Mass Effect: The Civil War
by ProfFartBurger
Summary: A house divided cannot stand. Following an explosive first contact, and the cementation of their place as a galactic superpower, the Systems Alliance must now deal with the consequences of their choices and the aftermath of their wars. Earth is set ablaze, Sparta is torn apart, and below it all simmers an ancient, apocalyptic plot. The finale to the WarVerse Prequel Wars trilogy.
1. AT HOME - Open Fire

_A/N:_

 _Welcome, welcome, welcome one and all!_

 _Let me get to the part you want to hear first: Release schedule.  
In a perfect world, I want to get one chapter out a week, but bare minimum will be one a month. I've got basically the whole story planned out, three chapters already written, and close to two dozen outlined, and that's about half of the story. _

_Cool?  
Cool. _

_Next: This is the 'finale', of sorts, of what I've come to call The Prequel Wars. This'll be the last story set before the Reaper Saga and will be what brings us as close to 'canon' as this series will_ _ **ever**_ _be. There will be twists and turns, things will be tied up and left wide open, ideas will be brought up and dropped, fun will be had, and as always, this Warverse, this grand experiment serves a grander (one could say 'originaler' were it a word) goal, one I hope to make strides toward pretty soon, and its entire point is for me to improve and entertain, so_ _ **please**_ _don't hold back._

 _Third: It's a pipe dream at the moment, one I think I mentioned a while back, but I intend (at some point) to update, remaster and reimagine The First War. Update it to keep the plot I have carved out after it was first published, rewrite it with all the lessons I've learned since then, and reimagine some of the goings-on in the story. Tiny details, bit battles, the whole nine yards, with the eventual goal of pushing it to another website (I'm thinking Spacebattles?) to expand its reach and get some more chances to improve in general._

 _Buuuuut that may not be for awhile, I'm still working out exactly how I would go about it, as I don't want to outright replace what I once wrote, as I think its mere existence serves as a good metric for how far I've come since I first started this beast, back when I was fourteen/fifteen._

 _Well, that's all for now, folks._

 _So, without further ado:_

 _We're off!_

* * *

 _Chapter 1_

* * *

 _"All wars are Civil Wars, because all men are brothers."_

— _Francois Fenelon_

* * *

Formed in the decades leading up to humankind's first foray outside of their home solar system, the Human Systems Alliance had been envisioned as a governing organization meant embody all of the best of humanity. Separated from the squabbling nations that made and still make up the UN, the word often used to describe the Alliance had been 'better'. 'Better' than the UN, 'better' than any one country, 'better' than the mistakes of the past; if there was ever truly _one_ objectively 'good' government in all of human history, it was meant to be the Alliance, and for a time, it _had_ been good. While the young Alliance struggled under the chafing control of the Earth, in the first decades it had existed, it managed to spread humans all across the solar system, and use the paltry funds and resources the UN granted and its colonies generated to field its military and eventually even break not just the surly bonds of Earth, but to - for the first time - leave the direct light of Sol. For nearly seventy years there was nothing but peace, prosperity, and advancement for the human race. Beyond minor jabs and jokes by Earth, no one truly questioned the Alliance until First Contact, and the war that followed. Suddenly, in the year 2201, not only was mankind faced with the knowledge that it wasn't alone in the universe, but the Alliance was given its first true test of mettle.

In the eyes of many, they failed this test.

When Earth was invaded by the turians, as ready as they had been to fight, no one on either side was truly prepared for all the things that went wrong to set the stage for everything that would come after. No amount of swift action from the Alliance had been able to avoid it, and as a result, faith in the Alliance was shaken in the one place it could least afford to have it. As many believed, the Alliance existed to defend humanity - and Earth above all. It was, after all, the homeworld, its sacred status was perhaps the one thing shared by any and all humans to ever live and to have ever lived, and by allowing the Hierarchy to land troops and siege their shores, the Alliance had failed in their duty to protect it. Ever since this failure, tensions had begun to rise between it and the United Nations, and they never stopped. The Alliance could do no right in the eyes of Earth and the UN, the latter of whom, rapidly beginning to realize how little control over the Alliance they would have in the coming years, kowtowed to human nature and grew fearful of losing said control.

Nothing the Alliance did helped the ever-escalating situation, and in many cases made it worse. Refusing to join the same interstellar coalition of species that had been gearing up for full-scale war against them made many view the Alliance as too isolationist and fearful for its own good. An explosive growth in territory made the governments of Earth fear the growing disparity between Earth's economic status and the Alliance's. The functionally instantaneous and universal admission of the quarians into the Alliance was reviled by just as many as it was loved, due to its direct influence over the war it spawned with the turians. The brushfire wars with so many Hegemony-sponsored mercenary corporations, the two wars with the batarian hegemony after that, the annexation of most of their territory, and the absorption of any and all slaves off of the conquered worlds had been criticized the galaxy over as an effort doomed to fail and burn incredible amounts of time, funds, and resources that could be better spent anywhere else.

But, while their actions contributed to a nearly endless rise in tensions, nothing but a true spark could light the powder keg that the Systems Alliance had become.

This spark came in the form of Hannah Shepard, former Captain in the Navy, turned defector, and vengeful mother. Her child had been abducted from his home while she had been away on a naval deployment, and while that alone was detestable, the true horror came from the fact that his abduction, and six hundred and eleven others just like it, were all government sanctioned. The intent behind them being to create the next generation to the Alliance's nigh-unstoppable program of bio-mechanically augmented super soldiers, under the belief that, like the Spartans of old, training a child up in the ways of war would create a warrior completely unparalleled. To make matters even worse, the children weren't raised as if they were in some sort of military school, but rather as if they, none older than seven when they had been 'recruited', were full-fledged soldiers. Endless drills, physical training even veteran special forces would have trouble with, the children were pushed so hard that by the time they were ready for their first round of augmentations, they could perform on the levels of Olympic athletes.

One way the Alliance had attempted to justify the program had been that all of the children were orphans, typically of war, and were merely being given chances to serve a higher purpose. However, one of these children was not the case - that being John S2-15, who had once had the surname of 'Shepard'. The son of the still living Hannah, he had been abducted due in part to his profound genetics and his biotic potential. When she discovered this, her defection, and subsequent whistleblow, had been almost instantaneous. She ran to the Citadel and would tell everyone who would listen of the evils of the Alliance. She became a household name the galaxy over, overnight, to the point where even the lawless Omega, so far removed from galactic politics, knew of what was happening.

The first day after Hannah Shepard had blown the proverbial whistle, all of human space held its breath, the less vocal of the Alliance's supporters and detractors both fearing and wondering just which planet would be the first to erupt into full-scale riots. Already a deadly powder keg ready to blow for years, Hannah Shepard's revelations was undoubtedly the spark it needed to go off. Truly, the only thing left to do was to watch to see where the powder trail ended first.

As many predicted, Earth was the first to go up. Aside from former Hegemony space, Earth was perhaps the only force in all of the Alliance that could stand up to it. Considering the Alliance's checkered history with the UN, and Earth's people - constantly trying to break away from its influence and generally being seen as having failed to protect them during the Second Contact war, respectively - Earth was, perhaps ironically, the most anti-Alliance state this side of Palaven.

As with many things, it all began with the tiniest of offenses: A single Korean store owner hanging up a sign in his bakery, refusing to serve anyone in an Alliance uniform. A retired Marine happened across it, and raised a fuss with the owner, attracting the attention of other customers, few of which were anything approaching pro-Alliance. The fight that inevitably broke out left several hospitalized, and the Marine dead, and from there it only escalated, with riots breaking out across the entire planet. Angry mobs formed enormous militias that stormed local Alliance embassies, and since local federal forces, be they anti-Alliance who were conveniently slow to react, or pro-Alliance who had too little numbers to make any major difference, couldn't stem the tide, dozens of embassies burned to the ground in the ensuing chaos, leaving only the biggest ones and the former Alliance capital building in Vancouver.

Order was eventually restored - but only after Alliance Military Police were deployed to defuse the situations by force. It took nearly seven entire days for the riots and the fires to be put out, and for arrests to be made. Worse was that some local police forces actually worked _against_ the Alliance, instead of alongside them, resulting in open skirmishes that left many dead and injured on both sides.

Unfortunately, Earth was only the beginning. Its riots prompted others elsewhere, and many predominantly human colonies, in the Sol System and out, erupted into chaos, raging at both Hannah Shepard's revelations and now the Alliance's handling of the situations on Earth. Anything the people could be mad at, soon became a rallying cry behind a riot. Unfortunately for them, many of these colonies were firmly under Alliance control, meaning that unlike on Earth, the Alliance could declare and enforce martial law, resulting in riots being swiftly put down and entire planets being locked down until the situation was de-escalated.

Worse, was that it wasn't only the humans that were affected by Earth's steadily increasing chaos. The shockwaves were spreading out everywhere, fracturing the Alliance in more ways than the obvious: The quarians, still shocked by the geth's sudden reappearance and subsequent admission into the Alliance, were also riding high on the idea of being able to reclaim their homeworld without even a spilling single drop of blood. While many may not harbor anything even approaching 'trust' for the geth, anti-AI sentiments had cooled significantly through exposure to the Alliance's SynthHumans, and fear of the geth had similarly slid away with the understanding that, in a pitched fight, the Alliance would win out - especially if, as many predicted, the Citadel joined the fight for fear of what an uncontained geth threat would entail. With their fears either put to rest or rationalized, almost universally the quarians began to abandon the inner Alliance colonies and make haste for the Perseus Veil, the Alliance's newfound island-like 'spike' into the Terminus Systems. More of them considered the entire brewing conflict to be more of a human affair than it was theirs: The peace with the geth and their repossession of Rannoch took precedence over the UN and the Alliance's long-overdue conflict. The only thing they felt linking them to this conflict was the Quarian servicemen in the Alliance's military.

Even the Alliance's population of AI, be they SynthHuman or geth, were affected by the exponentially increasing tensions. The geth set the precedent for all non-organics in the Alliance by declaring stark neutrality in the whole ordeal: The consensus reflecting the quarian belief that this was a human issue, and as a result had to be dealt with and solved by humans themselves. When asked to donate their military resources to assist in any military operations - be they riot suppression or, should the need arise, more open warfare - their condition was that they would only do so to replace lost ships and personnel for border patrols, not operations against other humans in the pursuit of this rapidly escalating conflict. On the other synthetic hand, the SynthHumans were starkly _for_ intervening in the growing tensions, and to provide as many unmanned resources as were physically possible, to minimize the casualties to their organic creators, potentially leave as much infrastructure intact as they could, and end the approaching conflict as soon as possible. This was, after all, the Alliance fighting itself _._ All would suffer, doubly so if they destroyed themselves.

And beyond the direct reach of the Alliance was the the former territory of the Batarian Hegemony, half of which was now annexed and firmly under Alliance occupation following their wars. Many forces still loyal to the Hegemony took this opportunity of weakness as a means to launch numerous insurrectionist movements and terrorist attacks, whereas forces who had once resisted the Hegemony in response rebelled against these loyalists, leading to clashes all across former-Hegemony space that required more Alliance resources in order to be pacified.

With this pattern prevailing all across the Alliance's zone of influence, it was rapidly becoming clear that few, if any, planets could truly rebel on their own. None of them save Saltor were even remotely militarized enough to be able to put forth any kind of formidable resistance, and that planet and its denizens were largely out of the equation by sheer virtue of the fact that it hadn't even been half a year since their unintentional entrance into galactic society. Any planet that tried to rebel, or any group that tried to incite massive riots, were swiftly put down by the overwhelming might of their government. Not a single colony could truly put up any resistance, and that left only one planet that was not, and never could be, even _called_ a colony.

Thus, as it was, the eyes of the Alliance, and indeed entire galaxy, soon turned to Earth, as more riots broke out and were contained, be it by sympathetic or apathetic local police, or Alliance forces, whose mere presence only furtherly fueled the fire. The words of the United Nations would dictate not just the fate of the growing tensions, but also that of perhaps the entire extrasolar government. Would it be peace, or would it be war?

The Sol System was where it would begin, and where it would be decided: If Earth could successfully rebel, then that meant other colonies with deteriorating opinions of the Alliance could as well.

* * *

Long before the Systems Alliance had experienced its explosive growth in territory, as a means to relieve the ever escalating tensions between the extrasolar government and its leash-holders on Earth, they had made the concession that for every two ships in the Home Fleet, one would be manned by a crew of UN-backed naval personnel. The end result ended up being that the single largest fleet in the Alliance, was actually only half ran by the Alliance itself. This was partially the reason Sol was capable of fielding such a massive defense fleet in comparison to other systems, with many of the ships and men were made and manned with resources from Earth's myriad nations, the Sol Fleet itself was as big as some Citadel race's entire navies. After all, no matter what tensions existed, more ships meant everyone on the ground felt safe, and even the UN recognized the value in that.

Unfortunately, one of the first orders given to the Home Fleet following the public reveal of Hannah Shepard's defection and of the SIGMA II's had been to raise their alert states to level three, just two steps below open warfare. The Board of Directors, the round table of politicians that lead the extrasolar government, had all but been certain that after this leak that some sort of armed conflict would be imminent, and there was only one planet in the Alliance that had the resources to mount anything even resembling a threatening resistance.

Even if joining up the navy with the intent of serving in a Planetary Defense Fleet was Alliance equivalent to the coast guard, that didn't eliminate the fact that, if other planets decided to rise against them, their defense fleets were manned by Alliance personnel. Any resistance put up by the planets they guarded could quickly be quelled by the superior positioning of the very forces the planets rebelled against. After all, orbital supremacy directly translated to aerial supremacy, which itself guaranteed domination of the ground. It was the same doctrine that had won them the Second Contact War, the Mercenary Wars, and both Batarian Wars.

Earth, however, was different. Unlike so many other planets, half of the fleets surrounding Earth and pervading the rest of the Sol System weren't manned by Alliance forces, and it had on its surface standing armies of tens of _millions_ in the ancient nations. As a result, Earth and the Sol System was perhaps the only one truly capable of posing a direct threat in the event of a war. As such, when Hannah Shepard blew the whistle, all of the Navy ships under the command of the Alliance soon grew weary. Security conditions were raised to their maximum levels capable without open war, crews ran drills daily, the entire solar system was poised on the brink of shooting itself to death, and everyone there knew it.

Worse was that few knew exactly what would happen and when, everything happening was unprecedented. The only interstellar wars ever fought by the Alliance were against enemies whose military technology was literally alien and arguably inferior to their own. No orbital cannons, no ships bigger than a kilometer, no warp drives, no magnetic weapons capable of scarring continents, no stockpiles of WMD's just sitting in the guts of even the smallest vessels. When the attack everyone feared was coming, came, no one knew from where to expect it. Would there be naval strikes? Ship against ship? Would there be crippling shots on the engines, such that the Separatists could take the ships back for themselves and use them to further resist? Would they just try to obliterate the ships with WMD's?

As it turned out, none of these were true. While it may be somewhat true that no one knew from where to expect the attacks, they were at least prepared for them to come from space, the only logical place to launch such an attack and begin such a war. So, obviously, the best place to strike was from the ground.

Specifically, the ground-based installations that controlled the thousands of Orbital Defense Satellites, floating around the Earth. Skyscraper sized cannons capable of shooting several hundred ton magnetic slugs at ten percent the speed of light. With a kinetic energy of nearly sixty thousand megatons of TNT, the only other non-nuclear weapon that could exceed its sheer destructive power was the antimatter weaponry wired into dreadnoughts. There was not a single ship in the known universe that had, or even could, survive a shot from one of these cannons. They were the strongest conventional weapons in the galaxy, and they weren't all bite, either: Not even counting Frigates providing local support, they were all practically plastered with onboard defenses.

Equipped with hundreds of fully automated defensive measures, with everything from AA guns to drones of both an aerial and ground variety, and even capable of detonating their own onboard reactors if they were ever captured, each one was a space station and a veritable fortress unto itself, the only way for an enemy force to reach and begin damaging it was if it had direct support from their naval vessels, but to do so would be to bring them within the ODS' non-Warp firing arc, leaving them all but untouchable.

Except, however, from the ground, where laid the computers that controlled them. While not lax on the defenses by any means, comparing the defenses of the satellite to the defenses of the base was like comparing a nuclear bunker to a medieval castle. Add on the fact that they were all built in remote locations, and a prevailing anti-Alliance opinion raging across the entire planet, the high school-sized facilities may very well have had targets on their backs. While it was true that these ground bases were more of a backup option, should there not be an AI available to personally direct the satellite's fire, that didn't change the result if the installations were to be taken: For a precious few seconds, until any loyalist AI took the satellites back, the power of mankind's strongest conventional weapons could be turned right on the people who had seen fit for decades now, to give mankind a bad name.

So, the UN's solution first was to ensure no such AI could gain access to the installations, such that they would remain firmly, and indisputably, under the UN's control, and that was where their near-universal pull over the Sol System came into play. While some would argue that the first shots of the Systems Alliance Civil War would have been when the ODS satellite's ground bases were taken, the truth was that the war's beginning was heralded when Earth shut off the local Deep Space/Communications satellite, and effectively crippled FTL communications in the Sol System. With civilian communications cut off entirely, and military communications forced to rely on the slower backup options, routed through the Defense Fleet's flagship, the United Nation's best operators had only a handful of minutes to breach the ODS ground bases, kill their way to the control center, hijack the satellites themselves, and use them to obliterate the flagship before the Alliance half of the SDF would catch on to the fact that the DS/C going down wasn't an accident.

Their best estimate had put it at ten minutes from the word 'go', until the Alliance figured out what was going on. Their worst estimate gave them ninety seconds: The exact amount of time it took for an AI to do a full and thorough systems check on both itself and the ship upon which it served. That meant, all else equal, for the worst-case scenario the UN forces had ninety seconds to steal the largest network of the galaxy's strongest conventional weapons, and summarily cripple half of the single largest fleet in the most powerful military fighting force in the history of mankind. If they couldn't, perhaps the entire war would be over before it could properly begin, as the power of the ODS Network simply could not be overstated enough.

The missions had been volunteer only, and not a single person on the shortlist refused the proverbial call. They chose to act twelve minutes after six in the morning, standard Alliance time. The ships would be in the last leg of their shifts, the people working them would be too tired to react quickly, and waking up everyone else when they inevitably geared up for battle would cause a discord among the rudely awakened and the fully exhausted.

When the clock struck, so did they. In one of the most coordinated strikes in modern history, all around the world, they attacked. From the sites hidden in the jungles of the Amazon to the offshore platforms floating about the ocean, from the secret installations in less inhabitable parts of the world to even the few under the _water,_ the best operators the United Nations had to offer stormed the greatest weakness in the Alliance's once thought-to-be ironclad defense. Surprise, stealth, and momentum were their greatest advantages. All of the attacks had two teams, the first would cause as much damage and kill as many people as possible, attracting all of the attention to them while the second would, hidden by their light-bending tactical cloaks, sprint through the bases as fast as they could, to reach the control center. Many would die, on both sides, but if successful, the ends would justify the means: Without the ODS platforms to support the separatist half of the Navy, Earth would have no chance at fighting this war for longer than a week.

* * *

One thing commonly seen in Citadel Space was that its various defense fleets were commonly clustered around two places: The planets or space stations they were defending, and the relays through which ships came. One of the primary reasons for this was that, as were they all, their ships and doctrines were designed around their FTL drives. Because their drive cores required frequent ventings in the magnetic fields of a planet, it was incredibly uncommon to see any ships breaking away from their local postings, to the point that 'patrols' typically equated to merely making brief FTL jumps, parking a ship in the orbit of a planet, and while it vented its drive core, scanning the system for anything out of the ordinary. Add on the fact that, all else being equal, the most advanced Citadel ships could only travel twelve light years in a day, and their weapons could hardly even reach a percentage of that, the end result was the iconic 'blockading' tactic, when it came to the various Council species' defense plans: The planet and the relay. As such, it wasn't uncommon to see the various defense fleets in near or outer orbit of the planet they were defending; for a time, it was thought that was the only way to do it.

Then came the Systems Alliance, who had an appropriately alien approach, when compared to their Council cousins.

The Alliance's main strengths came from the fact that they didn't require drive core venting, that they were capable of travelling _exponentially_ more than twelve light years in a day, and that their FTL drives weren't exclusively applicable to their ships. Since human ships essentially tore open portals in spacetime, those same portals could be dropped right in front of their guns, leading to them being capable of using traditional naval tactics, aged, improved, and perfected since the age of the sail: Whichever ship had better range than the other, would inevitably win, and a single Alliance ship could blast a target on the other side of the solar system, with pinpoint accuracy, and split-second timing. Better, or worse, depending on who was asked, was that, with an onboard Warp drive, a ship, or even weapons platform, orbiting the Earth could accurately hit a target in Alpha Centauri with a high level of reliability. The Warp wasn't just _fast,_ it was _ludicrously_ fast.

This incontestable range advantage reflected their defense doctrine: Instead of 'blockading' their various planets and having fleets park out in orbit, the majority of every Alliance defense fleet hovered out on the edges of the solar system, only 'dipping in' for regular patrols, shore leave, emergency situations, or for supply runs. Of course, this didn't mean there weren't ships parked in planetary orbit, only that there weren't nearly as many as other species may have, and the result was that one would be _lucky_ if they saw a naval vessel while descending Earth's atmosphere.

However, there was one glaring flaw in this doctrine, one that the Citadel didn't suffer from nearly as bad. While it was true that, from a tactical sense, Alliance vessels and their defense plans were superior, if only because they could be whole light-minutes out of an enemy's effective range and still able to operate with unimpinged efficiency, they thusly had to rely on their advanced sensory suites, and high-speed local Deep Space/Communications satellites as a means of keeping everything up to date, and all of the ships in the fleet on the same page. Without those FTL comms, they fell back on Flagships, which could perform the same tasks, albeit not as efficiently, due to needing to serve as a naval vessel as well as a communications hub.

To compare a flagship to any other vessel's FTL comms would be like comparing a jet to a rocket; they both would get the job done, and fast, but it was clear who would get it done first. Without a Flagship, or a DS/C, to piggyback their signals and increase their transmission speed, that meant a fleet was effectively in the blind; an AI couldn't even access the cloud without a reliable means of high-speed FTL comms. The fleet would thus either have to send a message 'the slow way' with their own FTL communications suite, which could result in updated orders being anywhere from hours, to even days away; or, perhaps just as dangerous, they would need to send volunteers out to find the closest DS/C and link up to it for updated orders. Truly, without the ability to communicate to the ships stationed inside the solar system, an Alliance defense fleet was blind, deaf, and dumb, and would subsequently be forced to inspect the situation personally.

Which was exactly the situation the Sol Fleet found itself in when, at 6:12 in the morning on an otherwise quaint September day, all fifteen of the Sol System's DS/C satellites failed, and the _Icarus Wings,_ the fleet's flagship, went completely silent. The fleet was practically plunged into the middle of a city, surrounded by people, and was unable to speak or hear, or be spoken to or heard by, any of them.

The only shining light in what was otherwise a very dark situation was that they were all inside the confines of the Sol System. As a result, even without the DS/C or the flagship, communications, while delayed, were still possible, if on the bleeding edge of viable. So, with that knowledge in mind, the Rear Admiral felt it most prudent to send out a scout. One volunteer out of his battle group would warp through the solar system to the _Icarus Wings'_ last known location, and if it was a bad coincidence, it would come back and they could work on fixing the issue; but if it was something more sinister, then there would be problems, and it was in light of the very real potential for these problems, that he decided to break protocol.

Standard doctrine when communications went down was for the fleet to either act on their previous orders if it was an assault situation, or in the case of defense fleets, for the ships in the blind to lock down and stay put. Having ships seemingly go missing simply because they tried to cruise around the solar system trying to figure things out was a surefire way to panic a great deal of people; but, that was under normal circumstances. Now? With Earth trying like mad to set itself on fire and one out of every three planets in the Alliance wanting the Board's heads on a platter? These were not normal circumstances, and added onto the suspect nature of the entire Sol System going dark almost instantaneously, there was some breathing room to break protocol, and for that reason, the Rear Admiral ordered his ship to drift, he wanted to be two light minutes away from his last reported position, just in case something happened, and he sent that same order out to all of the ships closest to him that he knew to be manned by Alliance personnel.

After ten minutes of nothing, the Rear Admiral's apprehension turned to anxiety. Compounded with the ship's AI confirming that it wasn't a problem on their end, nor a problem on any of the other ships within easy communications' distance, his anxiety turned to worry. After fifteen minutes, the distress calls began pouring in, turning his worry to fear.

All across the Sol System, any ships flying Alliance Colors were finding their main thrusters shot out and obliterated by ODS fire, and were fending off boarding attempts while they tried to get any kind of maneuverability back online. Any ships lucky enough to have naturally drifted too far from their last position, or that had had a Captain savvy enough to get the same idea as the Admiral, soon found themselves hounded and under assault by the ships that flew UN colors.

The _Icarus Wings,_ however, hadn't simply been crippled, and there had been no attempts whatsoever to board it. While it was true that Flagships were made from the same materials as Mass Relays, and as such were nigh-indestructible, that in no way meant that their crews were as well. Anything that got shot by a several hundred ton slug moving at ten percent the speed of light got hurt, and got hurt bad. It was why it was such a deadly weapon: Even if, by some miracle, a ship's shields could take the shot without breaking, or the ship's armor was strong enough to take the impact, all of that energy had to go somewhere. To say nothing of the kinetic energy transferring from the outside in upon impact, the heat alone was enough to liquify anyone either not in cryo, or not in an EVA suit, and that was just from one shot.

The _Icarus Wings_ had been enclosed in a 'cage' of Warp exits and shot seventy eight times. There just was no ship left, only streams of molten slag, detritus, and the occasional leftover remnants of a carbon-based lifeform.

This lightning-fast attack would set the tone for the rest of the Sol System's morning. The blitzkrieg was exceptionally well executed, turning what should have been an even split, eight thousand loyalist ships and eight thousand separatist ships, into something closer to three thousand loyalists still in any shape to fight and run, whereas the remaining ships on the Alliance's side were too crippled to run, and were fending off boarding parties on top of that. Worse was that, with the conclusion foregone that the UN would capture and repair the ships they stole, now they didn't only have a fighting force on the ground, they had a full-blown _navy_ to defend their skies.

The Rear Admiral didn't take long to figure out a plan of attack: To do the opposite and retreat. Even if the enemy didn't have a two-to-one numerical advantage on them, they had control over the all of the ODS platforms in the system, and were amped up and fully ready for a counter attack, to boot. The only option that didn't lead to more ships and more men dying was to retreat, and the only way to do that without being hounded endlessly by the UN's navy, was to leave the system entirely. The moment they switched back on the DS/C's, if the loyalist forces were anywhere inside the solar system, they'd be found in an instant; and beyond that, contact had to be reestablished with the Alliance. Going to Arcturus personally, at warp-speed, was the easiest way to get it done as expeditiously as possible.

In less than an hour, the largest fleet of warships in human history had been cut in half, and had one half taken apart again by the same fraction. Earth and the Sol System had gone from the single most heavily defended system in human space, to the most heavily contested, to the first solar system to have ever been conquered by an enemy force and stolen from Alliance control.

The once unbeatable Alliance had just had their decades and wars-long winning streak halted wholesale.

Earth was lost, stolen by the very people they were sworn to protect.

The Alliance Civil War had begun, and the entire galaxy would hinge upon, and dread its outcome.


	2. ABROAD - Intuitive

Chapter 2

* * *

 _Subject:_

 _I have no one else._

 _Message:_

 _Five of the greatest Commandos in the Republic died on a mission I sent them, and all they had to show for it was this address, and a second-hand promise that whomever was at the other end of it would be able to handle the situation in which I find myself far better than I can._

 _Someone, they explained, whose shadowy power rivaled that of The Mysterious One, a man I fear you know well enough to understand why I cannot name him._

 _Seeing as how I cannot openly operate against him, and any attempts at subterfuge likely will result in the same outcome as what I have just experienced, it is clear to me that the only option I have available is leaving everything to someone else, and unfortunately, I have no one else to turn._

 _So, Illusive Man, I come to you in search of help. Yours is perhaps the only organization that exists outside of his sphere of influence, and if what the Republic's Retrievers have learned is any indication, perhaps there are two great reasons as to why._

 _Regardless as to the why of it, The Mysterious One has spread his malicious web out from Alliance territory and into the Council's, with, I suspect, more extensions to come, to Terminus space. I tried to resist him and his advance, but I feel I need not repeat myself a third time in this regard._

 _The Mysterious One has something of mine that is irreplaceable, and perhaps just as terrible, he has unleashed something upon the Citadel and the galaxy that cannot be controlled and that does not fear him. Not an agent, but a Ghost, whose few traceable movements and actions have instilled within me a growing fear that he intends to destroy whatever fragile stability this galaxy enjoys, even in these times of Civil War in the Alliance._

 _Considering the known goals of your organization, I do not feel I need to explain to you why this would be an undesirable outcome._

 _However, I do believe that the defeat of this Ghost is perhaps the best way to disrupt, or perhaps even destroy, the Mysterious One's plans, and that is my plea: To send your best. I beg of you, investigate the Ghost, bring him to light and discredit him in a way I cannot, and, please, obtain what it is The Mysterious One lords over me._

 _I will be in your debt._

 _-Tevos Voria_

* * *

Seated out in the center of a room whose floor and ceiling were so dark as to evoke a starless night sky, and a still lake beneath it reflecting that darkness, faced with only a few inches of metal and glass separating him from the dying star that appeared so close that he could touch it, and so dim as to be almost a gigantic sphere of embers at the end of their burn cycle, the Illusive Man exhaled a long plume of smoke, feeling the buzz of nicotine coursing through his system as his glowing, cybernetic eyes remained locked onto the dully glowing holographic message floating in front of him. The message sent to him from the asari Councillor had, by necessity, been vetted nearly a dozen times before it had finally made its way to him, and of course it had, as its mere existence here was evidence of a security breach on some level. Be it the salarian STG feeding their asari equivalent, or be it those very Retrievers doing what they did best and seducing the information out of their targets, no matter their choice in the matter, his fifth column was on the radar of the Citadel Council.

Perhaps not the _worst_ thing in the world, especially considering their goals both immediate and long term, though definitely premature in the grand scheme of things. Resultantly, more concerning was what the message had to say. The Illusive Man remembered the moniker 'Mysterious One' from the correspondences he had intercepted and otherwise obtained from the highest levels of the former Hegemony's government before, during, and after the two Batarian Wars, and it appeared that Tevos knew this name as well, and had chosen it specifically as a means of identifying this individual through omission.

 _I need to increase the production of our infiltrator units…_ The Illusive Man thought, taking another drag on his cigarette, feeling the burn, ash, and smoke fill his lungs. _This coming as a surprise is not a pleasant revelation._ He held the smoke in his lungs for a few moments, frowning at the hologram, before exhaling, the acrid smell of smoke filling the air, but hardly registering to the man who had long since grown used to it. _Regardless… What does Edward and this 'Ghost' have to gain from operating upon the Citadel?_

He knew almost as much about Spokane as McGraw did, and subsequently knew that Spokane's elusive 'endgame' required the kinds of advanced technology that, on the whole, the stagnant Citadel races lacked. Certainly, as of late the competition and rivalry between them and the Alliance had helped to give them a spark of creativity to distance themselves from the near-total reliance upon prothean technology, but it was too little to make a difference at the moment, especially were one to bring up the point that they still, in a way, _were_ stagnant - that these developments were inspired in part by what they could obtain and see in use of, in the Alliance. Their reliance on gifts from precursors had by and large eroded their capacity for creative thought.

 _Perhaps…_ The Illusive Man thought, frown tightening. _I am thinking of this the wrong way. That Edward has no needs of, or desires for, Citadel operations beyond connections for his information network. That perhaps his operating upon the Citadel is the byproduct of something larger…_ His eyes centered on the word 'Ghost'. _Instead, I wonder if this Ghost couldn't be the key. He 'unleashed' it… Edward is a smart man, but he rarely, if ever, took on business partners when instead he could put them under contract… Indentured servants, in a way. This wording, however, would suggest not only that he had, but that he had done so on purpose. So what makes this 'Ghost' special? What could he have that Edward wants? And what could Edward have that he would want?_ He flicked some ash off of the end of his cigarette, the hot particulates falling down to the ashtray off to his side.

"Caesar." He spoke to the silent room.

At once, a firm, learned voice spoke back to him. " _Yes, Illusive Man?"_

"Contact McGraw."

" _At once."_

The holograms surrounding the Illusive Man faded away, shrinking down to pinprick dots and then clustering together like small stars in the night sky, while a small, circular field enveloped and surrounded him, growing up from the ground until it stood at a firm three meters. The Illusive Man waited, finishing off his cigarette and debating lighting another before his friend and partner appeared in his field of view, stepping onto his own Quantum Entanglement Communicator, several thousand lightyears away.

" _Man -"_ Began the enigmatic engineer in a despondent tone, as one hand swept through his shaggy hair and the other itched at his bare chest. " _\- your call ended up depressing me. Wanna know why?"_ He shoved a metal thumb over his shoulder, " _because that little shit_ saw _me walk out of my room like this and didn't even bother with the nanny routine. A_ _ **year**_ _ago, she would've been chasing me across the station with a shirt in hand! Now look at 'er. Just out of hospital and still managing to outclass most of the staff there."_ He sniffled, as though crying. " _She grew up so fast!"_ He said, voice wavering, before descending into a round of chuckles. " _Ugh, what's up? I was asleep."_ He asked, pulling a bundled up shirt out of one of his pockets and sliding it on.

"Were you?" The Illusive Man asked, a thin smile playing at one side of his face.

McGraw rolled his eyes, " _okay, fine. I was in another universe talking to one of an infinite number of alternate McGraws. He was a zombie, and wanted my help determining exactly how the nanites in his brain let him and him alone keep his higher brain functions."_ He said, smile not budging an inch as he walked out of frame, and soon came back, dragging a metal chair as noisily as he could. " _As an aside, we determined it was because his Gladys had lobotomized herself and figured out a way to upload_ _ **her**_ _programming to_ _ **his**_ _nanites, resulting in an AI that thought it was him, piloting a half-rotten sack of meat, and the only sentient creature left in his galaxy."_

Suppressing a sigh, the Illusive Man asked, "are you done?" Not yet sure on which end of the spectrum he had fallen today: Sometimes he enjoyed McGraw's stories and the efforts he went to to get reactions out of people, but other times, he found his friend's endless, aimless crusade grating, and would rather not be bothered.

" _Not even close. Now he's trying to figure out which he wants to solve first: AI creativity, or the cure to the plague... Seeing as they could go hand in hand. He kicked me out when I dropped a raw steak in front of him and laughed as he pounced on it."_ McGraw snorted, " _what's up, Jackie? I already know about Teltin. Got a betting pool around the Moose on whether it'll burn down or get reclaimed by the biosphere. My money was on fire."_

The Illusive Man shook his head, finding himself on the latter end of the spectrum, but now as always able to keep his patience. Say what one would about the Enigmatic Engineer, he had his uses. "As unfortunate as the news about that facility was, I thought it not worth waking you up for. No, rather I felt _this_ would." He said, hitting a button hovering above his chair and sending an information packet to his friend. "It should be arriving any second, now."

McGraw held up his cybernetic hand, and a moment later a small suite of dusty holograms appeared above his wrist and his palm. It took a moment more before one of them flashed yellow, and after McGraw flicked it with his free hand, his jovial face adopted an impressed expression. Lips pursed, he nodded, "huh… Not bad." He dropped his hand, humming.

"Your thoughts?" Intoned the Illusive Man.

" _This 'irreplaceable' thing… It's his gambit to extend that control over her for as long as he can have it, but I think he knows damn well and good that he can't keep a Councilor in his pocket forever. But he also knows that keeping this thing from her forever will deteriorate his control even faster… Necessitating a trade."_

The Illusive Man nodded, "her item for an extension of their contract, so to speak." He said, "I wonder where the Ghost plays into this. She specifically said he had unleashed it on the _Citadel,_ and the galaxy, and that it did not fear him."

" _Remember what Cthulhu said."_ McGraw prodded, sliding both hands through his hair and leaning back, letting out a long breath of air, halfway between a sigh and a yawn.

The Illusive Man leaned his head back, "ah." He said, "their agent was among us. Preparing for our fall." He nodded, "you think this could be the Ghost?"

" _The question then becomes what does he have that Ed wants, what does Ed have that he wants, and what do they both have that Tevos would want?"_ McGraw asked, leaning back forward. " _I get the strangest feeling I know what you're going to suggest."_

The Illusive Man nodded, flicking some ash from the end of his cigarette. "As successful as our infiltrator units are proving to be and as effective as the commando units are on track to be, neither are properly equipped or capable of undertaking the kind of investigation and wetwork this would require. The former due to an issue you just mentioned, the latter due to… Well, poor shelf life." He said, before taking a drag from his cigarette. "And seeing as a we will require a great many of our agents to put out the fires on Earth, that leaves us with only one option."

McGraw chuckled, " _I want you to consider her track record for a moment, because technically speaking, her last mission ended up leading to a SIGMA Civil War and gave us the power to field enough soldiers to rival some state armies."_

"I would counter that the first half is correlation, not causation." He let out a long puff of smoke, feeling the buzz of the stimulants coursing through his body.

" _Ha! I'll give you that."_ The enigmatic engineer nodded. " _Send me what you need to send me, and then…"_ He drawled, pulling a few holograms out of his smartwatch, " _here. I want you to look at this. Zombie McGraw came up with it. Apparently it's how they contained the outbreak on Earth. May help us out with our own containment of our own… I guess we could call it an outbreak, sure."_ He grinned, gave the Illusive Man a salute, and left.

The Illusive Man suppressed a roll of his eyes and nodded once, and once he retrieved what his friend sent him, he waved his hand from right to left. The entire hologram briefly pulsed a deep red color, and then shrank away to nothingness, ending the call.

* * *

Sometimes, though she would never give him the satisfaction of admitting it, Miranda Lawson found herself genuinely entertained by Christopher McGraw. Having essentially been adopted by the man, she found herself often exposed to technologies and sciences decades, some even more than a century beyond anything else in the galaxy 'below' them. Through her own work alone, she had been privy to small scale molecular assembly, AI synthesis without the requirement of a human brain, AI synthesis with _alien_ brains, and travel technologies that could outpace the _Warp._ In this sense, working for McGraw, in Cerberus' Intuitive Cell, was perhaps the best place she could ever hope to be, always on the bleeding edge.

"So basically: We think the apocalypse may be imminent and we want you to be our very first almost-kinda-sorta-not-really response to it."

But then there were the other times. When the more facetious parts of his personality came to pass. When she found herself obligated to play his nanny. When he'd go to mind boggling lengths to make up stories just for a bit joke. When he'd go for days without eating over something as inane as a piece of paper, when he'd drop an area of study when they were _literally_ seconds away from a breakthrough because 'it wasn't fun enough', and would burn the notes if the absurdity of such a thing was pointed out to him. This half - no, this _majority_ \- of McGraw, was what often had Miranda questioning whether or not she wanted to dedicate to the Intuitive Cell, or if she would want to leave for greener pastures, perhaps even a permanent field-operative status.

Take now, for instance, when he called her in for what he described as an 'operation of titanomachic importance', sat her down in a briefing room far too large for just two people, and then spoke as if he'd just spent the last three hours going over the minutiae of everything she had to know.

"Would you like to start again?" Miranda asked, resisting the urge to clench the bridge of her nose. "Perhaps from the beginning?" A beat, "or perhaps I can return to my workstation?" She desperately wanted to return to her research, having obtained the most recent data from the Alliance's BAAT program, and trying to compare it to some of the biotic feats she had seen some SIGMA II's being capable of.

"You said perhaps twice." The enigmatic engineer grinned, leaning back on his chair until only two legs were on the ground.

"McGraw, please." Miranda got to her feet with a sigh. "I thought we'd dis-"

"I talked to God." McGraw interrupted, "well… It _thought_ it was a god. It really just looked like Cthulhu, so… Kind of?" He waved his cybernetic hand back and forth in a 'so-so' fashion. "Elder God? I dunno." He shrugged, sneering after Miranda as she made her way to the door; just as she crossed its threshold, she heard, "you ever wonder how the protheans died?"

And with her lips pursed, and eyes shut, Miranda paused at the threshold to freedom, waiting for the enigmatic engineer to continue.

"'Cause I did. For all of... Like... An hour, before I concluded they hadn't _left,_ and they hadn't just gone to another segment of the galaxy, but rather they'd been killed off." Still looking out to the sterile white halls of her space station habitat, Miranda heard the legs of McGraw's chair hit the ground with a 'thump'. "And me and The Illusive Man both are pretty certain that not only are the things that did it still out there, but they're getting ready to come back."

Her frown now turning to one of curiosity, Miranda retreated back through the door, not letting her victory show on her face. Despite the randomness of his nature, once one knew how, it actually wasn't difficult to manipulate McGraw - so long as one's method never repeated itself often. She'd found that McGraw's threshold before he would figure out he was being tricked was a grand total of _one -_ after which, if repeated too soon, he'd realized that the person in question, often Miranda, but sometimes other staff on the station, had trained him, and he'd begin operating off of pure spite. Sometimes this benefited the young Lawson, sometimes it was a result she wanted, but more often than not that was just adding in an uncontrollable variable, and as such, she could never try the same thing twice, or at least, not twice in a row, or in the same year, for that matter. It was a delicate game, they played, one she had only recently begun to learn the rules to, but one she _reveled_ in playing. Being able to outwit _him_ wasn't something many people could claim to, but to do so regularly? She didn't know of _anyone._

"So now she's interested." McGraw said, with a grin.

Miranda finally sat down, across from McGraw, folding her hands in her lap and providing a mirrored image to him, who had one hand behind his head and dug into his shaggy brown hair, and another picking sleep out of his eye.

She waited for him to dispense with his theatrics, and once he did, he said, "so. The easiest way to explain it is to preface this by saying we have _remarkably_ little intelligence on them, only that the protheans called them the 'Reapers', and that they were responsible for their downfall." He explained, "we _had_ a piece of their technology for a time, but then we discovered that the Reapers, through a process we've begun calling indoctrination, are capable of mind controlling people who are exposed to their tech - and I _wish_ I was making that up.

"But, through a long and complicated process that involved me shoving my hand elbow-deep in Reaper goop, I was able to talk to one. I didn't get as much as I wanted, but he let slip one major piece of information: That someone out there, right now, is indoctrinated and working for them, to expedite their return."

Miranda held up a hand, "and what does this have to do with me?" A part of her wanted to be skeptical, but then all of the other, far more rational parts, told her that she was a genetically engineered spy-scientist working for Christopher McGraw who worked for someone else in a fifth column organization that had access to automated shipyards and cloning technology from a race that predated the protheans, just to name the _last few months_.

While something like this could be on the list of what could be considered far fetched, it was so close to the bottom as to be considered straddling the line between believable. Really, an outside agent _wiping_ out the protheans was actually what made quite a bit of the mysteries surrounding them make sense. Why there was so little evidence of their presence, despite translated texts pointing to a galaxy-spanning unified empire, how their architecture simplified near the end of said empire, how they vanished out of nowhere, how there were no signs of where they went or why they went there.

The biggest questions Miranda had were why her, and why _now?_ What made right now so special for these 'Reapers' to return?

McGraw nodded, "oh, that's simple: Pretty much _all_ of Cerberus is battening down the hatches and dedicating to fixing the mess the Alliance made with Earth." He explained, with a circular gesture of his hand. "And since you're out of the hospital and suddenly free, we can send you to the Citadel without disrupting our plans."

While she was curious as to how McGraw and the Illusive Man intended to just _fix_ a war that had been brewing for almost a century, instead she asked, "why the Citadel?"

"Oh. The asari Councillor is being blackmailed by Edward Spokane, who used her to get the Reaper Agent onto the Citadel. Apparently she _tried_ to get herself out of it, but failed spectacularly, so she came to us instead." He explained, "you're going to the Citadel to meet with one of our infiltration units, and investigate the Reaper Agent, who she calls 'Ghost'."

Miranda nodded, "am I going alone?"

Despite her expected answer, however, McGraw shook his head. "No, actually. You'll have one pit-stop beforehand." He adjusted his position in the seat, "see, we have no idea what to expect. Could be he's building an army, could be he's setting up an invasion, could be both, could be neither. Before we got this message the only thing we were intending to do - the only thing we _could_ do - is fix the Alliance, build our forces, and pray. But now that we have a direction, we need to pursue it… And because of these unknowns, we want to make sure you'll be fully covered if it comes to a gunfight."

Oh no, if he was suggesting what she thought he was - no, she'd have to refuse. The clones, while growing more stable, weren't _ready_ , not to stay idle for the potential days, weeks, or months she'd need them to. They lacked in just enough areas that they couldn't fully pass as human beings, not like the Infiltrators could. "McGraw, I'm not taking a clone. I've told you that without a base -"

"Oh, hell no. I'm not sending you with a clone. I'm sending you with a war criminal!" McGraw gave her a toothy grin.

Miranda leered at her boss, eyes unblinking and face set in the slightest frown. She stared at him like this until he rolled his eyes and dropped the grin.

"We cut a deal a few days ago with this guy at a military prison. He's N7. Problem is, he got a little overzealous killing some batarians during the war, and they don't know if his cutting down unarmed slaves was an accident or not." He explained, running his hand through his brown hair. "So they convicted him, and put him in a DSDC. Now, we _were_ going to bust him out, but then this stuff on Earth started going down, and we weren't sure how or even if we'd be getting it done when we initially wanted to. But, lo and behold, necessity and all that, we managed to find someone _perfectly_ suited for the task!" McGraw indicated his ward with a wave of the hand.

Miranda blinked, "I'm going to be breaking out an N7 war criminal to assist in this investigation."

"Well, less 'assist' and more 'act as backup'. So, in theory, sure, but in reality, not so much. We've got this whole thing planned out - you'll get the details when you start packing." He countered, waving his hand back and forth. "The important part is, we think the apocalypse may be imminent, and we want you to be our very first almost-kinda-sorta-not-really response to it."

Miranda slowly blinked, realizing that McGraw had just led her in a circle. She let out a long, disappointed sigh. She knew, of course, that he was also trying to bait a response out of her, it was his modus operandi: To show up to places, mouth off to people he really shouldn't, and then verbally destroy them based off of their reactions. What gave her the slightest pause was the realization that, no matter what she did, be it respond to him or remain silent, she was certain that it was what he wanted.

So, instead, she continued on, business as usual, nodding once. "Who is this N7?"

McGraw chuckled mutedly, shoulders quaking, "The hell should I know?" He asked, "only names I care to learn are the ones worth learning." He nodded, "operative word being care - you go pick him up, then you go to the Citadel, meet up with Unit Ten, they'll be on the Teyseri ward. Address won't be difficult to find." He leaned forward, digging one finger into his ear. "Anything else you want from me? Or will the files be good enough?"

Miranda shook her head, "you told me that these 'Reapers' destroyed the protheans." To which, McGraw nodded. "Am I to understand that, through obtaining this Ghost, this mission's true goal is to assess exactly how it was they could do so? Or to find definitive proof _that_ they'd done so?"

McGraw smiled, clapped both hands on his knees, pushed himself to his feet, and said, "yes!" As he walked around the table and out of the room.

Miranda watched as McGraw vacated the room without so much as a backwards glance. With a slow blink and a long sigh, she turned back forward, shaking her head and getting to her feet. A part of her wished she would have been surprised by McGraw's actions, but she'd been under his care and under his employ since she had been fourteen. That kind of exposure, even to this particular enigmatic mind, meant that there was little he could truly do to surprise her these days. Truly, she wondered if she wasn't among those prized few that actually _knew_ him.

Exiting the briefing room and finding herself standing in the cold, metallic-smelling air of McGraw's space station, Miranda strolled towards her room, arms swinging with each step.

 _Apocalypse._ She frowned. _Assume he's right. Take it at face value. They destroyed the protheans before us, and everyone before them. That says a remarkable amount about their strength and their technological superiority… But they'd always have variables to account for. Different breeding rates, territorial expansion rates, strengths and weaknesses… How would they control them, then?_ She hummed, passing by a pair of scientists excitedly exchanging notes on what looked like applications for element zero in nuclear fusion.

Seeing that, something sparked in her head, causing a brief pause in her gait as the idea formed and codified.

 _Element Zero could be it._ She thought. _Until Warp travel it was the only known method of FTL travel… And even we got lucky finding Warp. Eezo's very limiting in its range, as well. Machines could go long-distance with eezo no problem, they've no organics to worry about overheating, but not organics. Necessitating mass relays for interstellar travel longer than a few dozen lightyears… One could use that information to conclude that the Reapers might have built the Relays, and not the protheans._ A beat, _not hard, considering it isn't impossible to date the relays, even without removing pieces of them for study._

 _Add in that these relays often lead to places where more element zero can be easily found..._ She found herself at her work station, and soon began cleaning and organizing her desk, not wanting it to look like McGraw's often did: cluttered and in shambles. _We can conclude that the Reapers built the relays as a means of variable control. To promote further research into element zero-based FTL and reliance upon the relays. That would shorten the margin for error, leaving only species who evolved outside of relay range or, like us, who had their relays frozen, to potentially reach FTL outside of their planned methods… And even that would have a small chance of being worrisome, once said species found eezo, the relays, and their ease of use._

Desk clean and computer deactivated, Miranda straightened up and made for her quarters. _We may very well have been an outlier on an incredible scale, through sheer coincidence..._ She shook her head, rolling her hand through her raven hair. _But I'm reaching, now. Making too many conclusions with not enough evidence._ She had a theory, and that was the best she could hope for at the moment. The 'Ghost' would have to be her fact source.

Reaching her room, Miranda packed what she needed for the mission, and by the time she was halfway through, a message came through on her smartwatch. To save herself time, Miranda slid on a pair of heads up display glasses and read as she packed. There was the information McGraw had given her, reports written by him and even the Illusive Man on their preliminary findings on the Reapers, about indoctrination and their theories as to their goals.

Then, at the end, she found the name of the deep space detention center she was going to, and the identity of the N7 she'd be going to pick up. She found herself peering down at the mugshot of a man of oriental descent, a grimace set in his features appearing to be his neutral expression. The man had dark eyes and darker hair, and the wide-shot of his bare body showed one built by a military career, and marked by the scars of one as well. And in the final picture, one of naught but his head and his ID, she found his name:

Kai Leng.


	3. THE HOT GATES - Know Your Allies

_Chapter 3_

* * *

In the modern Milky Way, there were two known factions of soldiers who took it upon themselves to augment their bodies and minds to achieve a level of lethality and efficiency unmatched by all except the deadliest races. Appropriately, both of those factions belonged to one of the most militarized races: The transhuman SIGMA Operatives, of series One and Two. The first series, known as the Ones, were conceived nearly a century ago, after mankind began its first extrasolar colonization efforts in the 2150's. Comprised entirely of the Alliance's greatest soldiers, trained for seven years and then put under the knife for their augmentation surgeries, they were, for a time, the greatest and most lethal soldiers known to man. After contact and war with the Turian Hierarchy, however, and the subsequent deaths of a vast majority of the Ones alive at the time, it was decided that a second series, of even higher skill, would be required to further shepherd and protect humanity in a harsh and inhospitable galaxy.

This second series came in the form of the Twos. Unlike the Ones, this generation had been comprised not of consenting and voluntary adults, but rather of conscripted orphans of the Second Contact War. Trained from ages five to six until eighteen, augmented twice throughout their training, and benefitting from the technological advances separating their births and the inception of the Ones, the Twos were envisioned to be twice as deadly, twice as skilled, and twice as powerful as their older counterparts.

Of the few things valued by the Twos, loyalty was one of the most highly regarded. From day one they had been taught that if they could not trust the men they were fighting alongside, they could trust no one, and initially they had had no reason _not_ to trust their mentors implicitly. The Ones taught the Twos, they trained them, they raised them, fed them, clothed them, housed them, medicated them when they had to, and did so without hesitation or question. While clearly intrinsically different from the Twos in that they had led and could return to human lives before and after the program respectively, the fact remained that they still lived the augmented life of servitude and bled, sweat, and trained on the same world, serviced the same goals. This was worthy of the Twos' respect, which they readily gave, and as a result, for a time, they were allies, but as with all things, this did not last.

Beginning with the realization that at least one of the Twos had a parent who was still alive - a revelation that flew in the face of everything they had been promised and assured beforehand - and continuing on and on as more and more secrets were revealed, the Twos' faith in the Ones was rocked to their core, ultimately leading them to discovering the existence of and promptly declaring Protocol Sixty Six, the order that allowed SIGMAs to legally secede from the incumbent human government and work to dismantle it, were it determined to no longer represent the best interests of its people.

The Ones, as they were wont to do, wanted only one thing: What was best for humanity, for the species and its ideals, as a whole. The Twos, however, had grown not to care for such a thing anymore, not if they were protecting a species that actively sanctioned the theft of their lives from a young age, and not if they were fighting alongside people they couldn't even trust enough to give them the honest truth about their purpose and function. After learning that the SIGMAs were intended to be both a protecting and _guiding_ force for the human race, the Twos, disillusioned, demanded what few things any person would want:

A choice.

Their names, and the chance to have agency over their own lives. They wanted twenty four hours to experience humanity on their own terms and judge it for themselves. They wanted to be able to serve not because they were forced to, not because they had to or someone else demanded them to, but because it was what they _wanted_ to. They wanted a choice.

With this disagreement driving a wedge between them all, after the end of the Alliance's second conflict with the former Batarian Hegemony, the two factions of SIGMAs landed on their homeworld and separated, filing away into their bases and garrisons. When Sixty Six was declared, the leaders of the two opposing SIGMA factions, John Shepard S2-15, and John Doe S1-1, met, with war riding on their meeting's outcome. However, while the war they may begin was at the time undeclared, the amount of betrayal felt by the Twos and the trepidation felt by the Ones meant that though war had not been formally declared, it may very well have begun already. The meeting was as much a formality as it was the Ones and Twos defining their terms, which, for John Shepard S2-15, could be summarized in one of the ten lessons his entire life had been boiled down to:

Know your allies; a trust in them meant cohesiveness as a unit, cohesiveness meant efficiency, efficiency meant speed, speed meant victory, but to fail to know one's allies would be to lose everything.

Seek knowledge; that which allowed mankind to evolve to where it was was his greatest weapon, his mind. Educating it was to hone it, and a well-honed mind was the deadliest weapon in the universe, but to fail to keep one's mind sharp would be to lose its efficacy, was to lose its strength, was to invite weakness and malaise, was to die.

Be quiet; noise was distraction, distraction was death, so they were taught to remain silent unless absolutely required, and to return to this silence as soon as possible. Excess noise meant excess distraction, which led to excess death.

Eat fast; one never knew when their next meal would come, and failing to consume everything they would need would spell their deaths if their next chance to eat would be too long for a human body to last, even an augmented one.

Don't run; retreat was fine, it was encouraged even, but running was to show one's back to the enemy, and if an enemy saw their back, they would see on it a chance to attack the soldier unawares, which would lead to that soldier's death, and their defeat.

There is no after, so mind time; today was yesterday's tomorrow, putting anything off until 'after' was to invite laziness and weakness into a unit, because at any moment whatever they were putting off until 'after' could be required _immediately,_ and its lack of efficiency could spell their deaths. So, all time was precious, and should be spent wisely, as there was nothing more valuable.

Win; above all else this was their goal, and to lose was to put human lives in danger, that which they specifically sought to avoid.

Learn from your enemies; there was never a greater teacher than those who one would struggle against, for in victory and in defeat there were always lessons to learn in the ways one's enemies thought, and failing to learn was failing to seek knowledge.

And most important of all: Never give up your sidearm. It was perhaps the most important rule a SIGMA lived by. Humanity found its strength in tools, there was nothing they could do that a tool could not do better, including killing, and the same went for a superhuman soldier. Without a tool, without a weapon, they could not kill. Without it, they were weak. Without it, they would _die,_ so it didn't matter who asked for it, a two-bit mall cop on Earth, the Director for Alliance Affairs himself...

"Give me your sidearm."

Or another SIGMA.

Standing two meters from eachother were the two exemplars of the Ones and Twos. John Doe, with his ancient and batter, but well maintained suit of first-generation Titan One armor, the numbers _1-1_ emblazoned proudly on his chestplate in fresh white paint, and John Shepard, S2-15, in his second-generation armor, the numbers _2-15_ emblazoned on the harness secured over _his_ chest. They each stared the other down, Doe from behind his great golden visor of the gas mask that evoked a fireman's SCBA, Shepard from behind the soulless red plates, upon a mask that evoked an M40. Their 'faces' reflected the visages of the other: The One in his platemail and servos, the Two in his tactical harness and muscle suit. Each of them were deathly still after the younger of the SIGMAs' demand, their hands hovering, still as stone, over their weapons.

Because they knew what that meant:

All bridges had been burned.

All opportunities, lost.

All goodwill, wasted.

The time for talking was over.

To replace it all was the only option left:

 _SIGMA Civil War_.

John Doe's room, his so-often ill used office, filled with some of the trinkets and souvenirs of his past: A warhammer from his mission on the Citadel, a picture of him from before his augments, a map of Sparta, it was _dead silent_ as the entire world held its breath, and rightfully so: John Doe was the legend. He was _the_ SIGMA. With the highest bodycount attributed to any one soldier in all of human history, Doe was a living weapon of mass destruction, _the_ example to which all SIGMAs strived. But in front of him was what had been designed from the outset with _his_ standard in mind, was a generation of superhumans meant to be better than the best of them. Better than _him._ It was the Two chosen to lead them all, whose lineage already made him lethal, but whose training and augmentations made him beyond that, and whose anger, whose tranquil fury, made him _dangerous._ Made him Doe's _equal._

Shepard had superior reflexes and speed. His augmentations, the technology in his body and in his armor, was on another level, had decades of advancements in technology backing him up and making him superior. All of this and more showed itself when he drew his weapon, hand snapping to the grip of his pistol in three milliseconds, and bringing it halfway to his chest in four more.

But Doe had inordinately more experience. The book from which Shepard had been taught had been _written_ by _him._ Shepard had been born into the life, but it was a life whose mold had been cast _by Doe._ So when Shepard drew, he drew with decades of training and mind-bending speed, but when Doe reacted, he reacted with a _lifetime_ of experience telling him _exactly_ what to do when his opponent had the drop on him:

Tackle him to the ground.

In the blink of an eye, Shepard pulled the trigger, Doe threw himself forward, the bullet rebounded off of the energy shields over his shoulder, and the One had the Two on the ground, knee pinning his weapon-arm to the floor and armored fist going for the younger SIGMA's chin. Doe dug his hands into the helmet, trying to rip open the seal that kept it, the mask, and his suit all air-tight, as he thrashed Shepard with his free hand, pounding on his throat so hard and so fast that his shields registered it equivalent to being rammed by a truck.

Shepard wasn't phased, he threw his his legs up and locked his feet around Doe's throat. He yanked downward, but Doe's armor locked in place, immobilizing him and preventing Shepard from throwing him away. Doe grabbed for the knife secured to his chest and tore it out of its sheath so fast that it left the leather singed and smoldering for a brief instant, but Shepard threw his free hand up, locking his fingers around the blade and stopping it from moving before Doe could even try something with it. They struggled, entangled like this, for two seconds - twice as long as the entire encounter - before Shepard disentangled his legs from Doe's neck, but not to attack him - rather to hit the ground.

Enveloped in a violet aura of biotic energy, Shepard smashed both of his heels into the concrete floor below him. His mass had been raised so high, the impact so great, that it dropped them several inches - causing Doe to stumble just enough that Shepard's gun-arm snaked free. Doe immediately backed off, leaping out of the small crater as Shepard opened fire, emptying the magazine and taking out three quarters of Doe's shields. Shepard rolled out of the crater, reloading his gun as he did so, and then leapt out of the way of Doe's retaliatory attack, his head coming within centimeters of Doe's boot.

When Shepard snapped to his feet, his sidearm was magnetically stuck to his hip and his assault rifle was in his hands, screaming and bucking, spraying the living legend with armor-piercing rounds. Doe ducked down and threw one of his arms up, a hardlight aspis appearing in front of him and absorbing the gunfire; he charged forward before Shepard's gun was even empty, tackling the Two and pushing him into the wall of the office, mere inches from the door he'd just walked in. Doe let the shield vanish as he thrust his knife up towards Shepard's ribs, but the Two had his own trick ready - vanishing with a bright blue burst of biotic energy, charging to one end of the office, reappearing, and then charging _right_ back at Doe before the violet flame-trail had even dissipated. Shepard slammed into Doe with a biotic punch, the impact denting Doe's armor and sending him through the already weakened wall, but not before the One left the Two a present, which was immediately picked up by his HUD as a bright red flashing strobe.

Shepard's helmet adjusted a microsecond before the flashbang went off, his visor practically going black and his ears going deaf. He fell back a step, predicting Doe's next attack, as the One charged back through the hole in the wall and threw a haymaker at the Two. Shepard's forearm went up on instinct, intercepting the wide punch, and allowing him to counter with an uppercut to Doe's chest. The strike, which did nothing to damage the man, admittedly wasn't meant to: It was meant to make him stumble to the side, and open up a lightning-fast followup cross to Doe's head, which snapped to the left, then snapped to the right when Shepard smashed into it with his other fist, before being pounded and sent right back to the left by a third cross with the original fist.

Doe ducked under a fourth cross and tackled Shepard's midsection, bringing them to the ground again, where they slid several inches until they were just at the lip of the crater Shepard had left earlier. Now Doe's pistol was in his hand and it was jammed underneath Shepard's chin, too close for his shields to do anything. Shepard's response was to close the minuscule gap between the barrel and his chin, so when Doe fired, Shepard's armor held, and the bullet jammed up in Doe's gun. This had the side effect of stunning Shepard just long enough for Doe to immediately switch tactics, and after securing his gun to his hip, he grabbed at Shepard's throat and squeezed with only the strength a SIGMA One in power armor could muster. Even through his own protective suit, Shepard could feel his windpipe shut so tight that it could have held in a vacuum.

But in his haste to choke out Shepard, Doe had done nothing to secure the younger supersoldier's hands, so Shepard poured so much biotic energy that they began to darken in color, and then shoved upwards - pounding Doe in the chest with both fists and sending him flying up into the ceiling with a blast of biotic energy. But Doe's armor, as did all suits, weighed a ton, so when it hit the ceiling and he found himself buried into it, such a thing didn't last, and he was falling out of it and back to the ground almost as fast as he'd left it. He turned this to his advantage, using his weight and downward momentum and elbow-dropping the Two in his comparatively lightly-armored chest.

Shepard's lungs promptly lost all of the oxygen that had just been trapped in them, and the floor, already damaged, gave out when a two thousand pound man dropped onto it at speed. The two crashed from one floor to another in a shower of debris, almost going through _that_ when their combined two tons and that of the concrete and wires that went with them piled onto it without warning or proper preparation. It was a testament to the SIGMAs' Temple that it didn't give out, but it was weakened, and it made this known by groaning with the loud groan of shifting, crackling concrete that only a building under attack by some of the most powerful men alive could make.

The both of them were on their feet and reengaging in a second, unaware, uncaring, or unphased at the protest of the fortified _building_ that was weaker than _them._ Doe smashed Shepard in the face with a straight right jab, Shepard took the hit to open up Doe for a counter in the form of an uppercut to the crook of the man's jaw. Shepard twisted his right arm around Doe's, locking them together, and following up with more biotic strikes to Doe's ribs, each one echoing out with the sound of a mallet striking an anvil, only stopping when Doe's leg shot up and first blocked Shepard's next attack, then shoved his arm away, and then wrapped around the Two's elbow when he tried again.

Despite Doe now standing only on one leg, he still held his ground as Shepard pushed against him, so after a moment of this struggle, Shepard switched tactics - suddenly lunging backwards, taking Doe with him, but he didn't let the One go as they rolled over eachother. Instead, when Doe's back hit the ground, and Shepard was in the air, the Two straddled the one, letting go of his arm in order to pin them down with his knees. letting the Two rain down blows on Doe's masked face.

Shepard left a crack in Doe's visor, and that shocked Doe into action. Before Shepard knew it, he was thrown over Doe's head, having been kneed in the back hard enough that his armor was registering damage and even a few synthetic muscles having been sheared off. Shepard rolled to his feet and had to fall to the backfoot as Doe charged him; the Two tried to take advantage of Doe's forward momentum and jab at his head, but Doe ducked underneath it, landing a right cross, but missing his intended target and instead sending ripples across Shepard's left bicep. Shepard fell back a step and as Doe straightened up, he threw a wild left, but Doe leaned back, the punch missing by a mile. Doe's counter was to punch Shepard's arm out of the way, leaving the Two's core wide open, which Doe was eager to take advantage of - landing devastating punch right to Shepard's nose, causing him to stumble back.

Doe pressed his advantage, lunging in closer and smashing his fist into Shepard's ribs, ducking a right elbow and uppercutting Shepard's jaw. Shepard fell back against a wall, and was bounced off of it by Doe's knee ramming into his solar plexus. Shepard's arms went to his core and he was now completely on the defensive, weathering Doe's lightning-fast deluge of punches.

But as he was being hit, as the living legend in front of him was trying his damnedest to beat him to death, Shepard couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, was off.

This brief thought was thrown away when he saw an opening for attack and leapt for it on instinct. Doe had pivoted to the right, and that brief instant, that tiniest pause, gave Shepard the chance he needed to lunge in and bury his biotic fist into one of the dents in the armor he'd left before. He felt servos shatter and metal bend as he flattened the armor against Doe's ribs and deepened the veritable crater he'd left in the armor; Doe grunted, but responded in kind, grabbing both of Shepard's shoulders and kneeing him so hard in the chest that his armor sparked, some of the wires in the harness having been torn in two and reacting badly.

Shepard knew what to do with this, he reacted with practiced ease - looping his arm under the crook of Doe's knee and latching his hand on one of the folds in the plates covering his abdomen, and latching his second hand over his ribcage. With a loud roar, Shepard bodily lifted Doe from the ground and threw him at the far wall. Doe careened straight through it in a cloud of dust and debris, Shepard hot on his trail, rifle in hand, bullets exploding outwards, carving through the dust cloud and digging small divots in the legend's armor. Shepard leapt through the hole in the wall feet first, rifle spitting hot lead, Doe hit the ground amidst a clatter of stone and concrete, digging his hand into the concrete and grinding himself to a halt. He surged upwards and spun on the ball of his foot, backhanding Shepard's rifle and then spinning into it, smashing his fist into Shepard's head.

Shepard cleared the stars from his vision in time to see Doe catch Shepard's rifle before it even touched the ground. Dow swung it up like a club and smashed Shepard in the side of the head, shattering its stock as though it were made of glass, and as Shepard stumbled to the side, Doe ripped a magazine free of his armor and jammed it into Shepard's rifle. In an instant Doe had the rifle in a proper grip and aimed at the Two's head, but while his shields were out and his beatings had been so constant as to keep them from recharging, his biotics were another story. A quarter of Doe's magazine exploded out of the rifle in the time it took Shepard to rip a grenade from his chest, all of those rounds hit his biotic barrier, costing him his precious stamina but leaving him free of wounds. Shepard primed the grenade and hurled it at Doe, who didn't even leap out of the way - instead batting the grenade back at Shepard with his rifle. Shepard backhanded it away, causing it to explode harmlessly, briefly baptising the child soldier in fire and ash.

Barely even winded, Doe's stolen, damaged rifle snapped back to Shepard and was firing again. The Two's hand shot up, hardlight covering his palm in a blue glove, bullets bouncing off of it harmlessly as he charged forward. Doe's rifle clicked on empty, and Shepard threw a straight jab - ramming his knuckles into the rifle's barrel, his strength so much that the barrel didn't even bend, it, like its stock, broke like glass.

Doe discarded the now useless weapon, but was too slow to react to Shepard backhanding him across the right cheek, and following it up with a left cross, this one Doe was able to catch and use as leverage to haul himself up to his feet and slam his fist into Shepard's now dented helmet. He twisted Shepard's arm violently, causing the Two to grunt in pain, stunning him long enough for the One to front-kick the Two in the ribs, sending him sprawling across the room, right back in the hole he'd torn in the wall, his legs catching its edge and widening it to the point where a vehicle could have fit through.

Shepard stumbled to his feet, whirling around, and finding Doe still where he was. The two stared eachother down, armor sparking, damaged, and dented, some of Shepard's synthetic muscles severed and hanging like limp wires, pieces of Doe's suit missing and leaking tiny, sensitive parts, Shepard's helmet dented on his forehead, Doe's visor chipped and cracked, their rifles gone, some of their grenades spent, and the building around them showing the scars of their battle. Doe stood in the open, glaring at Shepard, who stood half in billowing smoke, leering at Doe.

Questioning why he was so slow.

He'd seen Doe in battle before, he'd seen mission footage as recent as _last week._ Something had happened between then and now, something was wrong with him, an edge had been lost.

A memory floated to Shepard's mind unbidden, one that had once been stolen from him, suppressed. A memory of a surgical station, of a doctor telling Doe his body was failing him, and would only continue to do so.

Of Doe vowing to fight on, fully aware of the fact.

Shepard clenched his armored fist. It wasn't much of an advantage, but even the slightest edge over the living legend was something he couldn't afford to give up. This man's experience meant everything, but his body was failing him - his stamina couldn't keep up, and if it was already failing him, then Shepard knew how to win this fight.

He needed _one_ opening. _One_ shot to do the kind of damage that Doe and his aging, ailing body and malfunctioning augments couldn't recover from.

And he knew _just_ the kind of weapon he could use to cause that damage.

Bringing his arms up again in a boxing stance, 2-15 lunged forward, sprinting towards 1-1 so fast that his feet tore chunks out of the ground beneath them. The One braced himself and ducked underneath the Two's Superman punch, spinning around the younger SIGMA and wrapping his arms around his comparatively lightly-armored chest. With a great heave, Doe suplexed Shepard and was on top of him in an instant, knife in hand and savagely chopping and slicing at Shepard's back, even managing to draw blood and throw it across the room before the knife was inside Shepard's armor a moment too long, and the synthetic muscles clamped down and broke it into pieces. Doe tried to respond by smashing his fist onto the last stabsite, and force the shards of his knife into Shepard's body, but Shepard had pulled another grenade from his chest and haphazardly threw it behind his head. It came _inches_ from Doe's face, and it was all he could do to shield it with his arms before it exploded.

His opponent sufficiently stunned, Shepard tore himself out from underneath Doe, coiled up like a spring, and used his biotics to charge at the one, snapping back to reality the instant before he impacted.

It was as though Doe had been hit by a cannonball, he was sent _flying._ Back through the hole they'd blasted in the wall earlier, through _that_ room, and through the far wall on the other end. Shepard realized his mistake the moment after making it, when his eagle-eyes caught sight of the bright blue lights indicative of the Temple's armory, and of a weapons rack just past this newly opened room. He frowned and charged forward, as Doe popped up, a rifle ready and loaded, its under-barrel grenade launcher firing with a 'thoom!'. Shepard's barriers were destroyed by the explosion, but he kept rushing forward, shielding his face to the subsequent gunfire. Before he reached Doe, he launched a biotic warp at the One, which slammed into him and instantly coated his armor, eating away at it.

Shepard tackled Doe, the both of them spilling into the brightly lit armory, crashing into a wall and sending dozens of rifles clattering to the floor. Doe grabbed at Shepard's mask and pulled hard enough that Shepard's decompression alarms went off, but with a thought he silenced those and threw his head forward - smashing it into Doe's and taking some more golden glass with him. Doe grunted, elbowing Shepard in the throat and then kneeing him in the stomach, Shepard fell back and Doe shoved forward, turning the knee into a front kick, sending Shepard clattering into the far wall, and sending more rifles to the ground.

But Doe's mistake was giving Shepard the room to maneuver, after he'd already been coated in the energy of a biotic attack. Enshrouded in violet flames, Shepard threw his open hand forward, and a biotic shockwave blasted out of him, sending everything in the armory not nailed down flying as though caught up by a tornado, and then _scattering_ when Doe _exploded_ from the biotic detonation.

Alongside a great deal of the ammunition and explosives housed in the armory.

Shepard didn't know how long he was out, or if he'd even blacked out at all. One moment he was in the brightly lit armory, the next everything was on fire, the air a mixture of the armory's bright sky blue lights and the harsh red of the fire, and choked by billowing smoke, alarms were blaring in his ears and flashing on his damaged heads up display, and he was on the ground, with Doe drunkenly trying to pull himself to his feet.

Swallowing some of the blood in his mouth, Shepard cupped his right hand, and it began to squirm and mold, a silvery, viscuous substance boiling like water and sliding into his palm, before rapidly coalescing, molding into a truncheon which the Two held with an iron grip. He flicked it to the side, and with a thought, a bright blue axe made of solid light formed off of its edge. Doe's head snapped up at the sight of this, a variable he hadn't even known existed. He ripped another knife from his suit as Shepard threw himself through the smoke and flames and chopped at the One. Doe brought his knife up to block the attack, and sparks flew as its cutting edge scraped against the hatchet's. Doe lunged forward, sliding around Shepard and slicing up his abdomen and to his back, to the dully glowing power cells on his suit's spinal mount.

Shepard grunted, feeling the blade carve open flesh through the damage suit, but after stumbling forward, he whirled around and swung again, this one heavier than he'd intended, and slower. Doe doubled over to dodge it and then lunged forward, his knife in a reverse grip and already screaming upwards. Shepard, however, did the same - he lunged forward and took the knife right to his chest, it sliding underneath his harness, scraping over one rib and under another, and cutting open one of his lungs.

But this gambit paid off - his suit, damaged as it was, could still clamp down and destroy the blade. Shepard quickly grabbed Doe's hand and kept it pinned to his chest, and Doe, unable to act fast enough, couldn't dodge Shepard's next attack:

The Two brought the glowing axe down on Doe's arm, cleaving through the armor plates, the skin, and the muscle, and stopping right at his bone, with the sound of glass striking metal and being dulled by flesh. Bright red blood immediately began pouring out of this grievous wound, but Doe capitalized on it, taking advantage of the fact that Shepard had made almost _exactly_ the same mistake as him: Sacrificing sure footing for a killing stroke.

Doe locked his good hand around Shepard's axe-hand, immobilizing it, and, alongside Shepard's hand keeping Doe's knife-hand pinned to his chest, the two were locked in an awkward struggle, left arms over right. They pushed against eachother so hard that they began digging up the ground beneath them, and perhaps appropriately, they had the same idea, and in unison, reared their heads, and threw them forward - metal striking metal and ringing like a bell's toll. They did this twice more, Doe's visor now an unrecognizable mass of spiderweb cracks, and so much bulletproof glass missing that one could almost see the man within through the thinnest layer that remained, while Shepard's own helmet was now dented so far that it pressed against his skull.

Then Doe realized things were becoming dark.

With a blink, his eyes shot down, and he saw that the haft of the axe was enshrouded in violent violet flames, raging like a bonfire. Those flames quickly spread down Shepard's arms and over his body, as he reared his head again. Doe knew his two choiced were to either take this, or rip his injured arm out of Shepard's grip to get away from it.

Well, he could fight with one arm.

With a loud bellow, Doe yanked his arm violently, tearing it out of Shepard's grip, and then doing the same for the one that Shepard was keeping pinned to his chest, before kicking Shepard in the chest to create some distance.

Shepard stumbled back, the violet biotic flames fading away as he beheld the living legend, whose left arm was so griegously wounded that Shepard could see half of his humerus through the blood spilling out of the now limp limb.

The both of them breathing heavily, they regarded eachother a moment, before throwing themselves back at it.

Or rather, Doe threw himself back at it.

Shepard _Charged._

Slamming into Doe shoulder-first with biotic speed, the pained Two sent the wounded One sprawling across the ground. Shepard kept his momentum up and dashed after the one, hopping into the air and coming down like a ton of bricks, pinning Doe's arms to the ground upon landing. Doe seemed barely able to move, and it was here Shepard went for the coup de grace.

Shepard brought the axe down on Doe's chest, instantly splitting metal and coating the glowing blue light with dark red blood. He did this again, widening the gap and causing blood to freely flow. The cutting edge was so sharp that the resistance only came when Doe's armor, skin, and bone dragged at the edges of the axe. Again and again Shepard chopped, grunting, shouting with each one until he and his glowing axe were covered in the blood of the once living legend, the light of the fires around him reflecting in it and his scorched armor.

And he _kept_ going, until the man's chest was split wide open and his arms began to hurt from the strain, his lungs burning with their need for oxygen. He finally stopped and, gasping for air, fell back from the corpse, hardlight blade vanishing, blood suddenly falling to the ground as the nanite haft encircled his hand again. He stared at his handiwork, the thoroughly dead legend, his once pristine armor, the cracked and damaged golden visor, only barely still polarized.

Head light and buzzing, Shepard raised his hand, it feeling a lot heavier now.

But just as he was about to open his smartwatch:

" _Understand something, Shepard."_ Doe said, voice as clear as it had been when they had tried talking last. " _Please understand why I am doing this, and why I won't stop until I win or die."_

Shepard turned back to the corpse, frowning, lips parted, his mask fogging up from the breaths heaving out of them.

" _Humanity… The world… The galaxy needs SIGMAs, Shepard."_ Said Doe, as Shepard lurched back forward and planted his hand on the corpse's armor.

"Cassidy, vitals." Shepard spoke.

" _The Alliance isn't perfect, but it is the best of bad options. If you all run out there… Even if by some miracle your mere existence doesn't fracture the Alliance, that will be it. The only ones of us left will be the ones who are alive. There will be no more, they won't allow it, or worse, there_ will _be more, but what they create is something they can control… And that won't be us, Shepard. Those won't be SIGMAs. Those won't be what we are, what we represent, they will lack that one thing that…"_ He sighed. " _That we kept from you, and cannot give, now. Against a cruel and inhospitable galaxy we are mankind's best defense, and we will defend against threats, foreign_ _ **and**_ _domestic, because they need us."_

" _John, there's nothing."_ Shepard's AI reported. " _No vitals. He's dead."_

"Is it prerecorded?"

" _No, the suit is dead. This… This is you. It's your radio."_

Shepard frowned.

Then, finally, the suit let off it's _Ping!_

And on Shepard's HUD was the piece of the puzzle that made the entire picture make sense:

 _Joseph Ducard S1-99_

" _I want you to understand this, Shepard. Our job is to remove threats to humanity, and right now, you are the greatest threat. So we will not stop. There will be no surrender. Not while you threaten humanity."_

Shepard reached forward to 'Doe's' chestplate, swiping his hand over _1-1,_ and wiping away the fresh paint, revealing an aged and weathered _1-99_ beneath it.

" _He was never here."_ Shepard breathed.

" _We made a mistake with you… And if it is the last thing we do, we will correct it."_

Shepard passed out.

* * *

There was a contingency in place. Doe and the Ones had assumed incorrectly that _all_ of the Twos had been squirreled away, hidden elsewhere on Sparta while Doe and Shepard had their meeting, but that hadn't been the case. Even had he ordered them not to be there, they would have gone anyways - just in case the inevitable happened. But he had told them to come, and he had told them to wait.

And they had been waiting too long.

Fifteen minutes was what Shepard, the de-facto leader of the Twos, had told them. If the Ones truly wanted their peace, they would be able to attain it in ten minutes. To anyone else that would sound almost ridiculous - fifteen minutes to avoid a war? - but to the SIGMAs, whose reflexes could be measured in the milliseconds and who were taught from day one to Mind Time, anything could be done if one had fifteen minutes.

It had been fourteen and thirty seconds since Shepard had left his brothers and fellows from SIGMA Two Alpha Squad. They were coiled like predatory felines ready to pounce, _waiting_ for those final thirty seconds to pass before they could run for the mountain base known only as the Temple. They knew that without assistance it would take them ninety seconds to run the more than six hundred meters separating the valley and the mountain in which the Temple had been built. They would have much rather remained closer to it, for a faster response time, but such a thing wouldn't have been possible, because of their armor and the One's suit.

The amount of money, time, and resources required to create a suit of Titan armor, regardless of its generation, was equivalent to that of a naval vessel. While a great deal of this cost did come from the materials used to create the armor itself, which were made of the same materials and same processes as the armor plates on a warship, and a small portion came from the advanced synthetic muscles and mechanized servos that augmented the wearer's strength, the majority of every one suit's cost came from its computer systems. Among the few systems not housed in space stations, Flagships, or ground-based defense installations to be capable of quantum computing, and with the addition of both generations of SIGMA Operative's Positronic Brain Implant, this meant that every SIGMA wearing a Titan suit was as much of a living weapon of mass destruction as they were a walking supercomputer.

The upside to this was that there was little beyond a full-fledged Artificial Intelligence that could outdo their information processing capabilities, and that every SIGMA could operate with almost one hundred percent independence, even if wholly separated from their usual support structure.

The downside to this was one unforeseen by the suit's brilliant designers: How difficult such a suit would make one SIGMA fighting another. With a radar range of several hundred meters, motion detectors capable of reaching more than a dozen, and IFF frequencies that could identify other Titan suits, that meant, among other things, it was functionally impossible for one SIGMA to sneak up or get the jump on another. In some cases, this was a blessing, but in this specific case, it was a curse, because neither of the members of SIGMA Two Alpha Squad could be any closer to the Temple than they were now, unless they wanted Doe to know they were here, and not with the other Twos at Delta Base. So Alpha squad had to remain out of radar range, and subsequently out of visual range, and their inability to see the Temple necessitated the fifteen minutes.

George S2-66, the comparatively massive of the Twos looked down to his thinner, leaner ally, Craig S2-82, who had cradled in his hands a sniper rifle. "Twenty seconds."

The sniper nodded once, saying all he had to with the stiff, robotic affirmation. George turned back to the north, as the timer continued ticking down and snow continued falling through the sky. Of course he knew what was happening, the amount of time that had passed and the fact that his suit had informed him that all outbound interstellar communications were being jammed told him everything he needed to know, but that didn't ease his mind. In the Temple right now were John Shepard S2-15 and John Doe S1-1, the prodigious biotic and the living legend. As good as the younger of the two were, Doe had the air of legend, the decades of experience. So many of the training conventions and general traditions of the SIGMAs had been all but written by Doe, he was considered by many to be a living weapon of mass destruction. The only thing he had going against him was age, but the machinery in his body negated that disadvantage so much so that even he, in his _eighties,_ was still fighting like a young man.

So when the clock hit fifteen and they still hadn't heard from Shepard, the two took off like bullets from a gun, their feet leaving divots and fractures in the snow-covered ground. It took them two seconds to reach their top footspeed, and another second after that for their suits' EVA thrusters to power up and further hasten them. In practically no time at all the Temple crested over the horizon and they grew closer with every passing seconds; their suits' Heads Up Displays quickly alerting them to the presence of two suits of armor on the Temple's second floor.

Perhaps they would have had something to say, perhaps something about how John Doe's office wasn't on the second floor but the third, but they hadn't the time, because a sound they had been hoping not to hear soon graced their ears with a small, white and red flag on the lower right corner of their HUDs. The sound that alerted any and all SIGMAs to the danger status or death of another SIGMA, and a sound they no doubt would be getting very acquainted with over the next few months.

 _Ping!_

Still running, the Twos each queued up the notification flag, but what they saw confused the both of them. Information that ran contrary to what they had been expecting. The two exchanged glances, expressions hidden by their helmets and their pace hardly even changing, and then turned back forward, able to explain what it was they were being shown, but not as readily able to believe it. They reached the Temple in short order, crashing through its front entrance and sprinting towards a stairwell. Inside the tight, cramped stairwell, the two ignored the stairs entirely and with the help of their armor they leapt to the second floor, the railings bending and snapping with loud metal groans under their immense weight. Were the stairs themselves not built specifically for SIGMAs in armor, _by_ SIGMAs in armor, they too would have buckled under their weight and they would have gone tumbling back down to ground level.

Now on the second floor, George threw his giant body at the reinforced door that led out of the stairwell. It buckled and crumpled under the impact, and as he hit the ground, Craig leapt over his back, rifle at the ready and scanning the area. He declared no contacts and after George extricated himself from the door, the two charged towards Shepard and Doe's radar contacts, noting with trepidation that they weren't getting them on their motion trackers.

Stampeding through the base, neither George nor Craig paid too much mind to the increasing amounts of damage they were witnessing as they grew closer and closer to Shepard and Doe. Of course they saw the outermost edges of the bullets the two had fired whizzing by their intended targets and scarring the walls, they saw the thin fissures in the concrete soon growing until they reached the craters left by the numerous impacts, be they of bullets, bombs, or body parts. Of course they saw the grayest of shadows on the wall bleed into the darkest scorch marks. They saw all of this and more, the distant scars of battle strengthening and thickening the closer they got to its epicenter, with their ocular enhancements giving them eyesight greater than that of even an eagle's, they couldn't _not_ see them, but what they could do was ignore it - ignore all of it - as completely irrelevant to their objective. The aftermath of the titanic battle, the sights and sounds, the acrid, smoky smells and burnt feels of it, none of it had to do with the here and now.

Here, they found Shepard and Doe.

Crashing into an armory, with guns, ammunition, and concrete debris strewn about the floor, having been thrown around from some sort of heavy impact, George and Craig found Shepard and Doe on the ground, the former leaned up against the wall, the latter buried several inches into a crater on the floor, covered in debris from the ceiling they had broken through on their way down. Craig rushed to Shepard and pressed his hand to the Two's suit, creating a connection to its computers and instantly discovering a set of positive vital signs, while George strode over to Doe, and now, they confirmed what the notification flag had told them earlier:

That Doe had never been here in the first place.

Laying below the big man was a One whose armor was destroyed, whose golden visor had been shattered, and whose mask had been ripped from his helmet and was now cast to the wayside several meters away. The lack of the One's mask revealed something, however, something that was only compounded by a single detail on his heavily damaged armor: A streak, made from a human hand, on the One's chest, having wiped off the debris caked onto his armor and scraped off a fresh coat of paint, removing _1-1,_ and revealing _1-99._

This wasn't John Doe, it was Joseph Ducard, the man who had _trained_ Shepard, George, and the rest of their company of Twos. George knelt down and planted his hand on Ducard's chest, his suit informing him that Ducard's IFF had been reprogrammed, swapped out with Doe's, to give the false impression that Doe himself had come for the meeting with Shepard. This meeting had been set up under the pretense of trying to sue for peace, but Doe had known, just as Shepard, and just had all the Ones and Twos, that their conflict had rocketed past likely and had landed in inevitable.

" _Got the bot."_ George heard over the radio, before a second speaker icon appeared in the top corner of his HUD. " _Connecting."_

" _Hey, George."_ Came a cool, female voice, her gray icon flashing with each syllable.

"Cassidy." George greeted the AI, his deep, accented voice filling the small space in his helmet. "Status."

" _Armor's at sixty percent capacity, nanites are doing the repairs but it will take forty hours. Longer if he fights again. He used his biotics like he did on the station again, but the damage to his amps should be -"_

" _Still talks too much."_ Craig cut in, " _wounded, stable. Recovering. Armor can be fixed."_

"Ducard is KIA." George reported, "Cassidy in as few words as possible, what happened?" He stood up, removing his hand from Ducard's chest.

" _They declared war."_ Said the AI. " _Doe was viewing the whole thing remotely. Talking over radio. We didn't know until I confirmed Ducard's death, and Doe continued broadcasting."_ A pause, " _he said he won't stop. There will be no surrender. Not while we 'threaten' humanity."_

George and Craig exchanged glances, not breaking eye contact even as the latter knelt beside their unconscious leader and, as though he didn't weigh a full ton in his armor, hauled him up in his arms and slung him over both shoulders in a fireman's carry. George was the first to look away, the gaze of his red-eyed gas mask lowering until it came to rest upon Ducard's body.

"Cassidy." He finally spoke.

" _Yes?"_

"Why did they not just say yes?"

The AI was silent for several seconds, before saying, " _I don't know."_

" _Instinct."_ Spoke Craig, his clipped voice vibrating out over the radio waves. " _We are threat. They didn't believe we would accept it. Not without recompense."_

George, shaking his head, hoisted his machine gun back into his arms and took point, leading the sniper and their unconscious leader out of the Temple.

* * *

Thousands of miles away, on the other side of the planet, seated inside the most secure facility outside of any of Mjolnir Base's continuity-of-species bunkers, the man known only by his assumed name stood, his hands behind his back, his face set in a stony expression, and eyes locked onto a map of Planet Sparta. With the faded, battle-scarred numbers _1-1_ written on one side of his chest, and the long weathered bars of an officer replaced with the fresh stars of a General on the other side, John Doe listened to the audio being broadcast from his helmet, as he frowned at three small red dots he had stuck to the lone facility built into the mountains of the planet's geographic north pole.

" _Wouldn't it just have been easier?"_ Asked 2-66.

 _Of course it would._ Doe thought, sorrow in his heart. _But it is never that easy, Two-Sixty Six. And you know that._

" _Yes."_ Said 2-82, " _but possibility existed. We would come back. Threaten humanity."_

 _In more ways than you could imagine._ If it were just a military threat they posed, that was a risk Doe would have taken in a heartbeat - it was the same risk _any_ SIGMA posed, thanks to Sixty Six - but it was more than that. The SIGMAs had, in many ways, become a symbol to humanity, and as much irony as Doe found in the idea that what equated to a sanctioned gang of killers were looked up to as symbols of hope by the masses, he couldn't deny that that was how they were seen, and if the nature of the II's ever got out, so many would instantly lose faith in that symbol that the power it wielded would be eroded in an instant. Worse was that those who would ally _against_ humanity would use that corrupted image, that lost hope, and the II's themselves if they were available, to campaign _against_ humankind. Arguing that _this_ was what they did when left to themselves, to lead and choose for themselves. That it was clear that the men and women from Earth were an interstellar empire with space-age technology and stone-age morals, that they needed an intermediary to govern over and instruct them.

 _And who would that be… The Citadel Council?_ Doe thought, _a rotten carcass of a stellar empire, scared so horribly by the vastness of space that its expansion, not just in land but in science and society, has slown to a virtual halt, barely crawling forward at all in more than two thousand years._ To say nothing of their backwards opinions on Artificial Intelligence. _They would take everything we have, mold it to their own devices, and then settle in again, accomplishing in centuries what we can in decades…_

 _The Terminus Systems? A wild conglomerate of lawless states only held under the banner of them not being officially in anyone's territory. T'Loak would have no desire nor knowledge of what to do with everything we have._ He shook his head. _Any of the other races in our Alliance? The geth are too self-serving, the quarians too cautious, the batarians too arrogant, the saltorians too unwilling to leave their solar system under any power but their own. No, the only ones who can rule us,_ _ **is**_ _us._ He decided once again, a firm frown settling on his face, dark brows furrowing above red eyes. _And… And they need us._

Worse was that he knew his species. Such massive death would invite a hatred that was only possible in one species hating something that was literally _not it._ If anyone - _anyone -_ sparked a major war with the Alliance, using the Twos as proof of their incompetence, the war they would begin would only be one of many. Win or lose, alone or with allies, humanity would inevitably retaliate and begin another war, and whether or not _that_ one was lost, at that point it would only be a cycle. Endlessly repeating hatred and violence. Lessons wouldn't be learned, not the way they would need to be. The galaxy was on a razor's edge, and the SIGMA II's, even with as innocent intentions as wanting to wrest control of their lives back in their own hands, would sharpen that edge so much that the only thing the galaxy could do would be to fall and cleave itself open.

Of course Doe knew that everlasting peace was impossible, he wasn't an idiot. But his job wasn't to preserve peace, or even to save lives - because his life was to fight even when there wasn't conflict, and to end lives - but rather to preserve the ideal _._ Certainly before First Contact it had been solely to protect humanity, but after that and the subsequent war, the duty of the Ones had changed. Humanity had come onto the scene and had revolutionized and revitalized a galaxy growing fat and weak upon the discoveries of trinkets and bits of scrap left behind by societies who had died eons ago. The Citadel, scared of the unknown and stagnant whenever there wasn't a prothean archive to hunt through, feared the Alliance because they showed the galaxy that it was possible to forge one's own destiny, create their own world, and that they didn't need to scavenge in the husk of a dead people to do so.

And the Ones knew that the only way to allow this, to have it happen, for any and all humans to reach the heights that they were capable of - for _anyone_ to reach the heights they were capable of! - would only be possible if all of them were allowed the chance to live their life under their own agency, to believe in what they choose and act upon them in the manner they choose to do so. No, humanity wasn't perfect and it never would be. If he were to be completely honest, many species were better than humans would _ever_ be at many things, and he even recognized that the Citadel's way of governing was in ways superior - an agency that had kept the peace for two uninterrupted millennia couldn't do so on _accident -_ but the strength in humanity came, perhaps ironically, in its naivete and its youth. So many species of the Citadel had been ruined, corrupted, and jaded by the society in which they and their ancestors had lived, that the stars above and the galaxy around them wasn't a wonder, but a nuisance. That technological progress the rates of which could only be described as exponential wasn't glorious, but terrifying. The prospect of new life, be it discovered or created, wasn't wondrous, but abhorrent.

Humanity had not those flaws, they had yet to become so jaded towards existence. His species, in its youth, in its naivete to the harsh nature of the universe, still had hope, and as such, for humans to be ruled by anyone _but_ humans would be tantamount to tying weights to one's legs and trying to run a marathon. Those crippling flaws afflicting the others who shared their galaxy would be introduced to them and as such progress would be made as it always would be, but it would be so slow as to be nonexistent when compared with the alternative, and any threat to that - to the idea - was unacceptable.

Allowing the Twos to leave, as much as he desperately wanted to do so, would only invite _ruin_ upon it. Perhaps not immediately, but it would happen eventually. It would turn not just humanity, but the _entire galaxy_ from the shining, glimmering beacon of reason, hope, science and progress it could be, into a dark, fetid pit ruled by fear, hate, and ignorance. Avoiding _that,_ was his job.

So, just as he'd made the mistake once to deprive six hundred and twelve children of this right, he now knew he'd be making the mistake again to _end_ those very same lives. But he'd come to terms with the black mark on his soul more than half of a century ago, when he'd gone under the knife. While ending these lives was little different than ending anyone else's lives, what differentiated then and now was that this war, perhaps the best and worst of his career, would consist of him desperately struggling to fix his own mistake. To right a wrong he'd made in the first place. Fourteen years ago he, alongside all but three others, had voted to allow the II's to happen. He had to deal with that decision.

And as a SIGMA, fighting other SIGMAs, that meant there was only one way to do so: _Fight it._ This, of course, meant that there was only one way to do so: Anti-SIGMA Warfare. That desperately tricky dance of constantly trying to out think and out predict an enemy one had to assume by necessity knew all of the actions one would undertake and would plan accordingly. Any SIGMA - any _one_ for that matter - attempting to practice ASWarfare would find themselves planning around the plans their enemies were planning around the plans they had made that relied upon the enemy knowing the plans they had made in response to plans they had to predict were being made. It was as much madness as it was science, and that was why it worked.

Case in point: This was a war, he knew, that couldn't be allowed to go on any longer than was absolutely necessary. The Ones held a numerical advantage at just under fifteen hundred operatives, and they had experience the likes of which the Twos had only the barest few months to attempt to match. The Twos, however, had a near lifetime of training, the familial bond of having been raised among one another, more advanced Titan suits and augmentations in their bodies, and a mindset that was, perhaps ironically, alien to the Ones. The solution would appear to be to end this as soon as possible, to use their advantages and attempt to fight and kill as many Twos in one battle as they possibly could, to deteriorate their numbers so much so that what they had left would be ill equipped to _win_ this war, and as such their only course of action would be to die swinging, necessitating a second battle that would end it.

That would be the perfect solution.

Unfortunately, theirs was not a perfect world, in a literal or metaphorical sense.

If Doe tried this, to dedicate each and every resource he had to ending this war as soon as possible, Shepard and the Twos' response could very well be to just fight an army with three men. To destroy the Ones by detonating the power cores on their suits, wiping out hundreds of Ones with each suit they destroyed. The Ones' numerical advantage would drop like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, and in that instant the Twos would be on the offensive with a clear path to victory in their sights.

Obviously, that couldn't happen.

So, Doe knew, there was only one option here: To play the long game. To settle in and force himself to realize that the only way to win this war was carefully and over a long period of time. To allow humanity and its Alliance to go unprotected for months - or even a _year -_ while those who were supposed to be its greatest symbols of hope slaughtered eachother over their own mistakes.

He let out a long, somber sigh. He wished he could have given them their choice. He wished he could have made a different one himself. He wished his species didn't _need_ people like him, but most of all:

He wished there wouldn't be a SIGMA Civil War.


	4. AT HOME - GYATM

Chapter 4

* * *

 _For those of you_ curious _about the trivia and IRL bits to a FartBurger's life_ , _you can read this bit. For those of you who don't quite care, the story awaits, and I'll make this short anyhow._

 _So: Where the hell have I been and what the hell happened to 'one a week'...?  
Well, I won't lie: Crippling writer's block, some anxiety issues, generalized laziness, work (Oh god, Work. I need a new career.), and general life shenanigans made it rather difficult to throw words at the screen.  
_

 _The good news is that while idle, I haven't been inactive. I've been spending a lot of time applying the lessons and conclusions I've learned from my little WarVerse experiment to my original setting and have been doing a lot of lore building for that. Major events, ships, technology, planets, civilizations, etc... I haven't gotten even a fraction of what's in my head down on paper, or what's on paper elsewhere in proper format where it needs to be, but I've started, and one of my earlier plans for introducing the world is still valid, I feel. I just have to... You know: Get around to it._

 _I won't make any promises I can't keep anymore, but I can at least promise that I **want** to get back into the game, when it comes to the WarVerse and my own setting, and I'm exploring options in doing just that, especially as things IRL are going to be entering a sort of equilibrium for the next few months at least. _

_That's all I got, really._

 _So let's jump into it:_

* * *

Eight thousand naval vessels, fifteen hundred Orbital Defense Satellites, and twenty six billion people spread across eight planets and a handful of moons.

Sol was lost, taken by the very people that lived in it.

With the sheer power and range of the orbital defenses around Earth, and the numbers and mobility of half of Sol's Defense fleet - and whatever they could steal during those opening hours - and a communications blackout leaving any information on the system increasingly out of date, no one in the Alliance knew what was happening in the light of Sol, which on its own was terrible, but was worse because of one major detail:

The Martian Exclusion Zone.

Formed before even the Alliance and home to one of the first ever military installations not built on Earth, the MEZ had been built in the days and years before Humanity had achieved interstellar flight, to hide inside of it definitive proof that not only was Man _not_ alone, but they had been visited once before. Now known to be ruins of prothean nature, the area at Mars' geographic south pole rapidly became home to the Systems Alliance's biggest blacksite. All of their biggest secrets, figuratively and literally, were kept inside the one hundred and fifty kilometer base. No one was allowed in but those with the proper clearance, and everyone who _was_ let in was sworn to secrecy of such thoroughness that some who had left the Alliance and immigrated to the Citadel were still under active surveillance, despite having seen nothing but the inside of a guard post; and while the United Nations didn't know _what_ was there past the Prothean Ruins, they did know that _it_ was there, which meant that it was almost completely certain that after taking and securing Sol, they would be throwing bodies at it to try and get in, to try and take whatever was in there, and use it to either fight or further discredit the Alliance.

Obviously not something that could be allowed to happen, but with the UN's navy and Earth's orbital network by-and-large denying access to the system and cutting off the MEZ, and with FTL communications impossible, the Alliance was rendered blind, deaf, and dumb, unable to do a _thing_ through lack of information.

So they did what anyone would do when they needed something scouted out: They sent in someone to reconnoiter the area.

They sent in _Force_ Recon, and alongside them, the coveted N7.

The Alliance knew that, with the ODS Network and the Sol Defense Fleet against them, the only way the Navy could roll in and take Sol was if _the Navy rolled in, and took Sol._ The whole thing, the Summer Fleet. It was the only way to take Sol back in a straight fight, the ODS network was too good, and with the Sol Fleet no doubt parking itself in Earth's orbit to defend said network, the only way to break through it would be through sheer numbers, and as that was a terrible decision for any number of reasons, the Alliance had to get creative. Fortunately, for as much as they didn't know about the goings-on in Sol, they _did_ at least know what it had been capable of before it was taken. They knew all of its dirty secrets and could use that as a base to come up with a strategy.

And that was how Sergeant Jorell'Sahn vas Balboa II found himself stuck inside a shuttle, waiting for a green light, and desperately trying to ignore how much it was _shaking._

Standard protocol ever since the Alliance made contact with the Hierarchy was to remove any Mass Relays within their borders, with the only exceptions being those lining the edges of their territory for travel, trade, and immigration purposes, and the Relays left in the territory of the former Batarian Hegemony, as they were essential for that region of space to continue functioning even close to as efficiently as it had been before annexation. As such, they had a stockpile of more than one hundred methods of FTL travel faster than even the Warp, and ones that were completely untraceable. So, on paper, the plan was simple: Use these Relays, orient them to Sol, and shoot two thousand Force Recon Marines at Mars. In practice, it was anything but. Jorell wasn't a Warp, Eezo, or Astro-Physicist, but he knew machines, it was _literally_ his job as an engineer to know them, and the prospect of exiting FTL so close to Mars' atmosphere, and at such speeds, that catching on fire and potentially shearing apart was an _active concern,_ was not appealing.

So Jorell white-knuckled the harness keeping him attached to the shuttle's bulkhead and tried to convince himself that, because he was in the shuttle with the N7, that meant his was more important, and they may survive this batshit insane stunt. This was _OD3_ nonsense, he specifically went Recon to _avoid_ being strapped into a metal coffin and shot at a planet, and yet here he was! Strapped into a metal coffin, pitch black, surrounded by people he could only see wireframe outlines of in his heads up display, and being shot at a planet _at lightspeed!_

He kept his eyes on the ground, forcing them to stay open as the shaking grew worse and he began to hear sound - faint and muffled, but sound nonetheless - from _outside_ the shuttle. They'd made it to Mars, but that was only the beginning of their problems, and he gulped loudly as he began counting down from ten. He and the rest of the Marines lurched in their seats _hard_ as the pilots slammed on the proverbial brakes and began actively throwing all of their engine power in the opposite direction, trying to slow themselves down to a speed remotely approaching respectable as they hurtled toward the cold red Martian ground.

Jorell was glad he was a quarian and he wore an environment suit, because said suit had mute functions in his helmet, and that meant no one heard him scream when the shuttle bounced off of the surface of the planet and skidded across the ground so far that its landing gear was sheared off before they came to a stop.

But, he realized, they were safe. They made it!

And everyone else was beginning to realize this as the lights went green and the harnesses unsecured themselves from the wall. Everyone was leaping to their feet and was slapping each other down, checking for injuries and celebrating having survived the dumbest infiltration in Alliance history.

"Ha!" Called the N7 from the pilot's cabin, his voice going out through the pressurized ship and the radios in everybody's helmets. "Ho! Oh man… Another happy landing!" He whistled, "whew!" Before descending from the front of the partially wrecked ship, his knees completely calm, contrasting all of the Marines who were half scared out of their wits.

Behind him was another N7 with Lieutenant stripes, he gave everyone a moment to collect themselves, looking up at the ceiling, no doubt paying attention to some data his HUD was feeding him about other shuttles coming in for a landing. Which ones lived, which ones didn't, how many, where they landed.

The Lieutenant nodded once, "alright!" He called out with a commanding voice, silencing everyone. "Everybody out! We're regrouping with the rest of them and then we're heading to the MEZ! Let's go!"

He hit a button on the bulkhead, and the lights went red again as the pressure was equalized, and the bay-door leading outside opened with a loud clanking and a crash on the Martian soil. Jorell and the others, rifles in hand, rushed outside, feet crunching mutedly on the thick red sand, suits instantly adjusting to the frigid temperatures underneath the blue-gray sky. Like the others, Jorell's rifle snapped up and he scanned his perimeter, and when he found nothing, he broke off and rushed towards the area the Lieutenant had designated, at the center of the near-hundred shuttles that had burned their way through Mars' atmosphere.

When everyone arrived, the collective four dozen N7 took the stage, summoning everyone's attention with a brief pulse through the Marines' Heads Up Displays. The Lieutenant from Jorell's shuttle was the one to speak.

" _Everybody listen up!"_ He called out, _"we're about five klicks from the MEZ. We're going to split up into four groups. I want you all to follow us and don't fire unless fired upon, and remember - we don't want to kill them if we don't have to! All their faults they're still human -"_ Jorell rolled his eyes, joined he didn't doubt by other non-humans, _"- and they'll be right back to the Alliance when all this is over! There's no need to kill them needlessly, understood?"_

A chorus of 'oorahs' met his question, and soon they all were beating the red Martian sands, rushing at respectable paces to the South. It didn't take long before they slowed down, reaching a ridge that offered a good overview of the area before them. Before the ridge, the N7 ordered everyone to stop, and pointed out a few of the NCO's. They were taken from the rest of the Marines and ushered up to the ridge where they would reconnoiter the area, and select targets for airstrikes. The UN, it seemed, was _very_ determined to get into the MEZ, to the point where they had been lobbing mortars at its defensive shields for days without stop.

Jorell busied himself by tinkering with a drone. Knowing that they were going to want it flying soon, he didn't want it to go down when the shooting started up in earnest and a dust storm kicked up and caked it. It may have been the first time he'd been to Mars, but he knew well and good that sand in a machine was a terrible combination, and since Mars' surface was practically rusted iron, it would only be worse. As he set up a small workshop and got to business, he silently admitted he found the silence around him to be strange, off-putting, even. He was used to a clatter of activity whenever he was out on the job, but with Mars' thin atmosphere he could hardly hear himself drop a wrench onto a metal table right in front of him.

Which, of course, meant that unless someone radioed him or spoke on the public channel, that meant he was left alone with his thoughts, which wasn't a place he really wanted to be. No, he _wanted_ to be on a shuttle to Rannoch, he had some leave he could have burned had his unit not been activated, and _damn_ he would have liked to see the homeworld. He remembered reading articles and seeing pictures of it from orbit, the first pictures taken in _centuries,_ and a _lot_ of people were talking about the graveyard the Geth had built. Apparently, for every single Quarian that had died during the Morning War, the Geth had catalogued their deaths and performed proper ceremonial burials, leading to a gravesite so expansive and graves so numerous that it could actually be seen from orbit.

But, no. Jorell couldn't see it for himself. He couldn't see the cities the Geth had meticulously repaired and maintained over the centuries. He couldn't see the works of art they had recovered and preserved, or the animal life that had flourished. He couldn't breathe unfiltered, _Quarian_ air. He had to stand here, shin-deep in rusty soil, and check over a machine that would allow him and others to kill humans easier, and he didn't really know what to think about that. On the one hand, he didn't disagree with Earth that the Alliance had made one _hell_ of a mistake with the Twos, and he also didn't disagree that some major changes needed to happen, starting at least with a systemic change of leadership. But on the other hand, what was the UN really hoping to accomplish by starting an interstellar war? Even ignoring the fact that the Citadel hated their guts now more than ever, and the fact that the former Hegemony was such a hot spot that joining the military practically guaranteed a visit to Khar'shan at some point, Earth was _one_ planet. The Alliance even before the Hegemony was almost three dozen. Even if the UN managed to indefinitely keep the Alliance out, they couldn't go on to _beat_ them, it was just impossible. But instead of fighting this war in the courtrooms, they'd just broken out their guns. In a way, it made Jorell -

" _Alright, eyes up! Here she comes!"_ Jorell heard the N7 Lieutenant's voice bark out over the radio.

Smoothing out a layer of sealant, Jorell looked over his shoulder towards the peak. A giant pale blue sphere opened up and expanded to the size of a football field. Jorell turned to look at it, eyebrow raised, realizing that not only had he not often seen a Warp from the other side, but he hadn't _ever_ seen an Entry or an Exit open up in atmosphere - it was outlawed to hell and back due to the effects it had on a planet's environment. It was mesmerising, in its own way - bright, yet not radiating any light, almost like an unnatural bluish hole in reality.

Then, out from said hole in reality, came screaming the _SSV Eisenhower,_ an older carrier, likely chosen due to it being slightly more expendable than one of the newer ones in service. Jorell saw its wide, flat-rimmed nose break through the Warp first, rapidly followed by its sleek black surface, the flat top, and the dozen runway openings running alongside each side of the ship, all of which were already spitting out as many fighter jets and transport shuttles as they could. As more of the ship passed through the Warp, its missile pods began opening, and out was shot the things being laser designated by Force Recon and the N7: The Orbital Dropping Death Dealers. Hundreds of them, strapped into metal pods and launched out of their ships like bullets from a gun, they all hurtled directly for the UN Forward Operating Bases, while the Marines in the shuttles were breaking for the MEZ.

Jorell saw a sea of tiny green outlines behind him appear on his HUD, each one wrapping around the friendly forces like a wireframe, and around him he saw his fellow Marines hooting and hollering, jumping up into the air, cheering at the sight of the -

Jorell was suddenly on his back, alarms in his suit were screaming at him, his head hurt like someone had smashed it with a baseball bat, it was pitch black around him, and the mission clock had jumped ahead two hours. The quarian engineer groaned, forcing himself to an upright position and checking his suit and mask for punctures on autopilot, while his foggy mind tried to figure out what had happened to him.

Looking around, he realized that it wasn't pitch black, but rather the air was _filled_ with dust and sand, so thick that it appeared as though it were black as night, when in reality it was just a deep, dark, lightless red. Thanks to Mars' thin atmosphere, even though it was clear these sands were moving at high speeds, it barely felt like a tickle to him, but that didn't answer why a sandstorm had just _appeared_ like that, or why the clock had jumped forward.

The quarian grunted, and pressed his hand to his neck, cycling through radio channels. "This is Sergeant Sahn… who's up?" But no one responded to him, and when he finished checking his suit and found it battered, but functional, he pushed himself to his feet, and he searched for his rifle, but it the sandstorm was so thick, and his flashlights so ineffective, that he found nothing even after five minutes of searching.

He tried the radio again, "this is -"

" _I hear you, Sergeant."_ That voice sounded familiar, but his head was filled with so much fog he couldn't place it. _"It's Anderson, what's your location?"_ Jorell's HUD finally snapped back to life, identifying the speaker as one of the N7.

Jorell let go of his neck and scoffed, before he keyed back in, "unknown... " He grunted in pain again. "What hit us?"

Anderson let out a morose sigh, _"Earth must have had their fingers on the trigger. Moment the Eisenhower warped in they shot the dome with an ODS. Whole place went up - even got lit on fire for a few minutes, now the whole planet's under the sand. The Eisenhower's down, crashed, survivors are fighting. The dome broke too, the UN's pouring in."_

Jorell felt some drugs from his suit kicking in, and it cleared some of the fog, giving him the presence of mind to realize that he'd lost his drone _and_ his rifle, and that having _no_ gun right now would probably be a terrible idea, so he drew his pistol. "How about Force Recon? What're we doing?"

" _Lot of us took bad hits and died in the decompression. Just a few hundred of us in fighting shape, barely a squad of N7. I see you on my HUD, stay put, I'm coming to you."_

"Copy that… What's the plan?" Jorell asked, finding the boulder he'd smashed into and leaning against it.

" _Figuring that out. Sands are too thick to get comms with the Eisenhower, so we can't coordinate with them, figure out what, if anything, she can do."_ And, it went unspoken, if anything was even _left._ A ship doesn't just _survive_ getting shot by an ODS, not at full power. Jorell saw a pair of bright flashlights cutting through the sand, low, like the person was crouched down, and moving slowly. _"Is that you?"_

Jorell waved his hand, "yeah." He affirmed, as his HUD identified Anderson and outlined him with a friendly wireframe. "Care to turn the headlights off?"

Anderson acquiesced, and reached Jorell, clapping him on the shoulder. _"How are you holding up?"_

"Pretty sure I fractured my skull and a few ribs… And my toe's been bothering me a few days now, probably got a hangnail."

" _Smartass."_ Anderson rolled his head exaggeratedly. _"Come on. I've got some guys combing our A/O, looking for more Recon survivors… After that, our best idea is to fight our way to the Eisenhower. Aside from the MEZ itself, that's probably our best bet for a staging ground."_

"We're not worried Earth will shoot us again?" Jorell asked, as he followed Anderson, the both of them with their guns up and at the ready.

" _Oh we're definitely worried they'll shoot us again. We'd hoped they wouldn't put the civilian biodomes at risk by hitting the planet with anything stronger than a Destroyer, but it seems we were wrong. Now we're just hoping they won't risk killing their own soldiers, but anything's possible now."_ Anderson admitted. _"You seen anyone since you've woken up?"_

Jorell shook his head, "just you." A beat, "that bad?"

" _Be honest with you: You may be one of the highest ranking Marines still in fighting shape. Worse: I think you're our only engineer."_

Jorell nodded, his mind going a little hollow as he tried to wrap his mind around the astronomical odds of both of those things becoming true at the same time, and thankful for his forest green visor being there to mask his blanching face. "That bad."

Anderson let out a hollow sigh, _"yeah."_ He said, _"problem with Civil Wars. The folks rebelling don't have much compunction for whatever they destroy."_ He intoned, _"long standing human tradition when fighting a superior army: Make it too expensive for them to keep fighting."_

Jorell saw the logic in that, and silently hoped the Alliance would find a way to hit the Sol System fast and hard, keep up their momentum before they had to call it quits. Pistol in hand and knees crouched, he said, "so we've got no eyes?"

" _We_ are _the eyes."_ Anderson reminded him, _"but to answer your question, dust is too thick. Only got a single pass from a drone before we took it down - dust so thick we didn't want it out too long. Didn't look good."_

Jorell sighed, "well… Damn."

" _Right."_ Said Anderson, as Jorell's motion sensor began lighting up, showing him increasingly large numbers of friendlies in the distance, soon joined by light green wireframes outlining them all.

The sight wasn't pretty, even through the dust blinding him to finer details any further past his face than a foot, with his HUD's assistance Jorell saw a lot of men and women lying on the ground on their backs, limbs wrapped in red wireframes delineating injuries, while some had lost life or limb entirely due to their suits being opened up to the thin Martian atmosphere. It was a miracle that his own suit hadn't been breached, though Jorell was tempted to think otherwise, with the pain in his chest from the ribs grinding together.

Anderson, having straightened up and lowered his rifle, clasped Jorell on his shoulder, tearing the Quarian's attention from the wounded Marines around him. _"C'mon, the others are this way."_ He said, _"anyone with rank is contributing to the battle plan… How long've you been Sergeant?"_ He asked.

 _Oh, he'll love this._ Jorell chuckled, "couple months."

" _Hm…"_ Anderson grunted, _"suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You're… What, thirty?"_

The Quarian shook his head, _"nineteen, sir."_

This caught Anderson's attention, he saw the N7's wireframe turn to face him, and then his gaze raise over Jorell's head, no doubt calling up his profile and double checking his information. Anderson's shoulders slumped in surprise, _"wow."_ He murmured, _"nineteen and already a sergeant…"_ He looked over the young Quarian, _"you're something else, son."_

Jorell nodded, "lotta guys in my squad give me no end of grief over it. Like to make unsightly comments about what I did to who's body parts and where."

Anderson laughed, _"I don't doubt it."_ He said, shaking his head. _"Here we are, sync to the local channel."_ Jorell's HUD lit up at this, offering him the choice to do so.

Jorell did, and was immediately thrust into a conversation-in-progress with four N7 Officers, plus Anderson, one Force Recon officer, and a half dozen NCO's, some of whom were, according to Jorell's hud and their outlines, were sporting minor to moderate injuries, with one's outline even _red_ around his stomach, leading Jorell to wonder what organ he'd ruptured, and how the guy was still up.

" _-ermittent radio contact. There are definitely survivors out there, so they can't have hit it full-strength."_ Said one speaker, a Marine.

" _Of course not. You shoot anything with an ODS at full-strength and it won't be there anymore… And the planet is tiny and solid all the way through. If they shot Mars I'd be worried the planet would crack in half."_ Said another, _"I think we should count ourselves lucky they hit the dome and not the ship. Might've dealt with more than just a shockwave, then."_

" _Anderson."_ Anderson introduced himself, catching the attention of those present. _"Found the survivor. Engineer, Jorell'Shan."_ He indicated Jorell, who received nods, as everyone else turned to the shared-hologram in their HUDS, depicting a map of the area, their cliff face marked by a great yellow line in the blue map, a giant green dot labelled 'EISENHOWER' on the eastern end, and a green line labeled 'MEZ' on the northern end, with dozens of small red dots marking UN positions.

" _Nice to meet you, Sahn. Lieutenant Tucker, N7."_ Jorell's HUD labeled the man as a Destroyer, and Jorell had to agree with it - the man's armor made him look like he could get into a fist fight with a tank and not have to worry. _"Situation as follows: Earth hit us with an ODS. Whole damn planet's already covered in dust storms, Eisenhower's down. The storm clears intermittently and we hear fighting over comms - there are survivors. Plan is to get to the Eisenhower, use it as a staging area to push the UN back out of the MEZ."_

Jorell nodded, deciding it prudent to keep that Anderson had told him all this to himself. "How are we going to do that?"

" _Two plans."_ Came the lone Marine officer, a Lieutenant. _"Loud or quiet. We go in loud and attract all the attention over here -"_ He indicated the western edge of the map. _"- get them all looking at us so our wounded can be guided to the Eisenhower over this way."_ He drew a red line through the map, straight from them, to the eastern edge, to the Eisenhower.

" _Or we go quiet."_ Insisted an N7 who was marked by Jorell's HUD as a Shadow Infiltrator. _"Use the storm to our advantage, cut straight through them to the ship. They won't even know we're there."_

" _And then trade being stuck here for being stuck in a downed spacecraft carrier?"_ Asked a Marine, incredulously. _"All due respect ma'am, but splitting them up three ways - north, east, and west - would make taking them down easier! Take some heat off the ship and the MEZ -"_

" _Maybe if we were full strength."_ Tucker cut in, _"but we're barely half, now, and even with our HUDs we can't see more than a few meters. We'd be fighting under strength and blind. We get to the ship we can use its resources, pull out their vehicles, their mechs, and ground-drones."_

Anderson gave his two cents, _"why not power up our shuttles?"_ He asked, _"even if half of them are out, we can load them up with our wounded and use the Eisenhower's AA defenses to cover them. It's a short flight, use the boosters and make it a fast one."_ A beat, _"one of those hangars has to still be open. They'd clear it for us, and then we could take advantage of the fact we've a ship now… Downed as it is."_ He argued.

Tucker shook his head, _"good idea, but that relies on the UN not looking up, not having sent up AA defenses, and the Eisenhower's sensors not being damaged. If they know aircraft are coming, but can't identify friend-or-foe, they'll shoot us down."_

Jorell, listening to all this, was staring intently at the map being shared to his HUD, his brow furrowed. "Uh…" He said, "maybe it's already been discussed and shot down, but what's stopping us from burning through enemy munitions?"

All eyes settled on him, expectant silence reigning between them all.

"Taking _their_ drones? Using _their_ sensors?" He continued, "you guys identified all their outposts before the Eisenhower even showed up." He nodded to Anderson, "Lieutenant Anderson said they were all shelling the hell out of the dome, so they've got mortars. They've _got_ to have drones, UGV's… We could have the best of all worlds: Force them to fight on multiple fronts, use the dust storm to sneak in, take the heat off the Eisenhower and the MEZ, get access to more resources…" He noticed Anderson, Tucker, and the Marine Officer each looking at the map now. "Right?"

" _Problem with that is our engineer's out, and without clear skies we can't open up a connection to the Eisenhower's AI. Those drones would be useless to us."_

Jorell raised his hands to the sides, "I've had to break through drone security before, in worse conditions to boot." He said, "best case scenario I get them firing on them. Worst case, I shut them down… But either way we'll have access to their sensor suites. A couple thousand tiny radars showing us exactly where UN fighters are… We take over one or two of their mortar nests -"

" _We could tear them apart from the inside out."_ Anderson was nodding now. _"We'd only have a limited window. They'd figure out pretty fast that the mortars are coming from their own bases."_

" _But if we take the heat off the ship and the MEZ, send in our wounded with our locations, we'll have reinforcements. Wouldn't have to hold out long, would just need to check our fire."_ The Marine Officer noted.

The NCO's seconded their opinion. _"Numbers we have, even accounting for a good chunk of us broken away and escorting our wounded, we could hold one or two of those cannons."_ Said one.

" _Especially if we get their drones on our side."_ Said another. _"Their main FOB is here at the back of them all - it'd have drone controls. Better, we take that we could cut their whole force in half and kill their comms to boot."_

" _Put one of us in a shuttle and we could provide close air support."_ Said the third. _"Might not have much but it's more than nothing."_

But the N7 started shaking their heads, _"let's not get hasty. Flying in this weather is a terrible idea, and we'd again run into the problem of the Eisenhower. We can't confirm if they'll be able to identify us in the air."_ One said, _"nor can we confirm how long the drones will last in this weather."_

Jorell piped in, "conditions aren't ideal, but the ground drones are more durable than the UAV's. They'll hold through at least a little while, especially if there are ones that haven't deployed yet. How long ago was the shot?" He asked, "two hours?" He did a little mental math, head bobbing from side to side. "Then, maybe have another thirty minutes before we need to start worrying… And worst case scenario, their last commands can be to expend all ammunition and we can use them as cover."

The collective Special Forces and Officers all turned their attention to the map shared between their HUD's, the discussion turning towards which mortar sites to target. Some advocated attacking multiple sites spread out over the entire offensive line, so as to force the UN forces to divide themselves as far as possible when they responded. The other prevailing idea, however, argued that this would place the Alliance forces in unnecessary danger when the UN inevitably responded, and that taking over a few cannons in a centralized area would allow the Alliance forces still combat-ready to consolidate themselves and put up a more thorough defense. Eventually, however, the fact that more Marines were scheduled to arrive via another Relay shot was brought up, and they, alongside Force Recon and the crew of the Eisenhower, would be more than sufficient to allow for the first option to be viable, as they would be able to employ their numbers and offset the higher risk. The only catch would be that the mortar crews would have to survive until they arrived or, failing that, either retreat back over the ridge and hide in the Martian wilderness or rely on the Eisenhower's crew to bail them out.

With a plan set, the N7 began consolidating their information on projected defenses for the mortar installations, while the Marines present began discussing exactly how they would go about moving their wounded. Jorell was busied with taking anyone without something better to do and readying their drones for the attack. Considering how few of them actually knew what they were doing or even how the drones worked, Jorell considered his assignment tantamount to suddenly being put at the top of a pack of the equivalent to a bunch of illiterate children, but fortunately the job wasn't so difficult that they couldn't get it done: They needed to clean them as best they could and start up their computers. Working around the Martian dust turned out to be a challenge, and their solution turned out, to Jorell, to be hilarious - as they abandoned twenty third century technology and simply draped blankets over them, crawled underneath, and started blasting them with compressed gasses, clearing the dust with a gust of air, and scrubbing off the particulates too stubborn to just be blown off.

As they did this, Jorell flipped switches, booted up their networked intelligences, and began their startup sequences, working as fast as he could to start up as many of them as he could. By the time all was finished, half of their drones were clean and booted up, and the other half were cannibalized for use as improvised stretchers for the wounded. Jorell was given control of the drones and, due to his role in the upcoming assault, was made the priority target for their defense by Anderson. Their forces were then split up into two halves: Their injured, who would flee to the _Eisenhower,_ alongside half of the Marines still able to fight, and the remaining Marines, the N7, and the drones, who would take one of their mortar guns and try to disorganize the UN forces.

It was a Hail Mary, a desperate act, but it was the best plan they had.

" _One push."_ Said Anderson, as they watched the Bravo Team begin heading for their insertion point. _"One push, we disorganize 'em, all of us will be able to push 'em back."_

Jorell and the others on the Alpha Team nodded, and once Bravo went too far for their HUD's and motion trackers to see, they began moving themselves. Jorell and Anderson trailed behind the group, flanked on both sides and being led by the drones, while the other Marines kept up with the N7. Jorell noticed he couldn't see the Infiltrator on his HUD, and was informed that she'd been sent ahead to inform the Eisenhower of what was about to happen, before she used her particular set of skills to further sow chaos in the ranks of the UN forces.

With the wind howling mutedly in his ears, the only thing Jorell could hear was it and the sound of the Martian dust and sand smacking into his helmet, like thousands of tiny pebbles cascading across plastic, metal, and glass. He couldn't see a thing through the dark, thick dust storm, with he and the rest of them finding themselves relying upon the maps they had drawn up beforehand as a means of navigation.

Unfortunately, this had its drawbacks: After a few minutes, they realized they'd been thrown off course. Drifting by means of simple human error, the maps not able to actively track their locations, and the storm blinding them to any potential landmarks. This resulted in the group nearly missing their mark when it came to start the attack - the timer for the Bravo Team to make their mad dash had hit less than thirty seconds before the Destroyer was able to locate the mortar encampment, assisted by the unfortunate sight of its barrel lighting up when it fired another shell.

Lacking the time to set up any sort of sophisticated attack, the combined forces of Force Recon and N7 almost literally threw caution to the wind and charged - their brutal attack heralded by the aerial drones hurtling ahead and strafing the encampment with machine gun and micro-missile fire. The four-legged ground drones immediately opened up as well, their heavier machine guns and spinal-mounted railguns blasting apart the targets marked by their aerial allies. The Destroyer led the less synthetic forces' charge, his gigantic suit of power armor propelling him into the fray in seconds, and his own machine guns and missiles throwing the defenders into disarray. Alongside the less specialized N7 and his fellow Marines, the whole thing went by in minutes; it was a slaughterhouse, Jorell hardly had to fire his weapon before the all clear was given. The FOB, it seemed, was manned by a skeleton crew, a vast majority of its forces having been thrown at the MEZ once the dome went down, leaving so few behind that it hardly even qualified as a base anymore. The ground mechs hadn't even made it halfway to the cannon, and the UN drones hadn't even finished booting up.

Unfortunately, that meant that the process had been started - and Jorell was now in a race against time. _"Sahn! Go!"_ Anderson called out, _"turn them around or turn them off!"_ He yelled, as he took the drone controls from Jorell and had them precautionarily target the UN drones, such that they'd be ready to blast them to pieces should they finish powering up before Jorell could work his magic.

Jorell sprinted ahead of Anderson and their drones, Mars' lighter gravity letting him make the several meter distance in but a few seconds - he almost felt like he was flying, leaving him only able to imagine what it would feel like when he had to beat feet on Luna.

Putting those thoughts aside, Jorell hurtled across the red ground and through the dust-choked air, practically colliding with the prefabricated hut that the drone controls would be in. Force Recon was there at the airlock, they grabbed at his combat vest and pulled him in before slamming the door shut. As the dust literally settled, the airlock pressurized and Jorell's HUD reported a safe atmosphere. He and one of the Marines ripped open the inner airlock, and after pushing his way through the door, Jorell had only a moment to take in the scene he found inside - and it had him immediately shouldering his way back into the airlock: The UN drone operator had had a moment of genius and predicted that the Alliance may try to steal their drones, so after activating the bootup process he'd smashed the consoles. Ordinarily this would lock them into starting up, as a failsafe measure - the idea being that if the process began and then the computers were damaged, it was likely because they were under attack and may need the drones.

Dangerous as such a prospect was at the moment, Jorell had experience with a situation not unlike this one, and from that experience he knew that drones were all networked together, sharing data. All he had to do was connect to one and force an update to it - it would interpret it as new orders, a change in the tactical situation, and its VI would push it to the others, and with no reason not to trust the first - the humans were there for that - they would accept it, and in so doing, turn the UN bots into Alliance bots. The problem - and the challenge - would come from the fact that last time he'd been reprogramming friendly bots. This time he was in a race against time to reprogram bots that, once they finished booting up, would immediately set to killing him and his buddies.

And he was already losing that race.

"Open it back up!" He screamed, practically foaming at the mouth, shoving his way back into the airlock.

Sensing his urgency, the Marine at the egress hatch lunged forward and hit the emergency decompression switch. Immediately the airlock - and the entire hut - began decompressing, and in seconds was equalized with Mars' exterior atmospheric pressure. The Marines practically threw themselves at the door, ripping it open and spilling outside, to the befuddlement of the N7 setting up in cover around the drones whirring to life.

" _Sahn!"_ Called Anderson, _"what -"_

" _Terminal's smashed need hardline!"_ Jorell barked back, scrambling briefly on all fours as he sprinted full-tilt to the drones themselves.

Anderson threw himself at the situation, assisting Jorell in removing the tarps, exposing the drones to the open air, and their bellies to the Engineer. The Quarian immediately dropped to his knees, grabbed the armor of the closest drone, and slid underneath it, pulling a multitool out of his vest and ramming it into the seam between two plates in the center of the drone.

As Jorell pried the drone open, he did a mental countdown of when the attack had begun, when they'd realized the drones were turning on, and now - and realized he had about one minute to literally and figuratively break a machine and put it together.

No pressure.

Wedging the multitool into the plate, Jorell pulled hard enough that he snapped the screws keeping it in place. The plate fell, its corner hitting Jorell in the face, but he shrugged it off and grabbed at the new opening to the drone's innards. He pulled himself up, now in a sitting position, with his torso in the guts of the machine. The flashlights on the sides of his mask immediately switched on and illuminated the inside, and Jorell grabbed at the drone's hardline cable, roughly pulling it towards him and connecting it to his smart watch.

" _Anderson, send me the controls!"_ He called out, as the drone's legs began to groan, and it started to lift itself in the air, the insides lighting up and the sounds of the coolant beginning to flow just barely making it through the thin atmosphere and to Jorell's ears.

Without a word, Anderson obeyed, and Jorell's HUD pinged with the faint gray notification that he'd received control of the Alliance drones again.

As Jorell hurriedly hammered away at the keyboard on his watch, he twitched his head to the right, smacking his ear with his shoulder and then speaking out, "VI, give me IFF." He gulped, feeling sweat bead up on his forehead.

" _Sahn, their guns are spooling up!"_ Anderson called out, _"finish it up now or get out of there!"_

But Jorell rebuked him, _"I got this!"_ He said, even as he was physically lifted up as the drone stood to attention; Jorell had to stuff his leg inside with him to pin himself to the small hatch he'd made. As he continued hammering away at his smart watch, digging his way through folder after folder, finding, opening, and then prying into endless applications and lines of code as he made his way towards the one he was looking for, he continued dictating to the VI he was connected to. _"VI, copy IFF!"_ He said, _"show smart watch on HUD!"_ He added, as the drone's innards started to get filled with the dust from the storm.

The watch soon was outlined on his heads up display just as a green flag notified him that the IFF data for the Alliance drones had successfully been copied and was waiting for him to use it.

" _Sahn!"_ Anderson called out, as Jorell felt more than heard the drone opening fire, and knew that the other ones were now beginning to get up, pulling the tarps off. _"You're out of time!"_

" _Stay down, Lieutenant! I just need a few more seconds!"_ They couldn't afford to miss this shot - not only would they not have access to, and control over, _all_ of the UN's drones, but if they lost this chance they'd also have to _fight_ those drones too.

" _Jackson, it's turning towards you!"_ Anderson shouted, as Jorell's mech started moving with purpose, " _move!"_

Jorell knew why Anderson had let him hear that, but he pushed on - having found the command files. He opened up the app and found himself in more familiar territory - the application looking almost identical to the one he used for his own drones; and of course it would, they were all the same model, running the same programs.

Jorell opened up the application's debug mode as the whole drone quaked, its railgun firing. Only Mars' thick atmosphere and his helmet's insulation kept Jorell from going deaf, but he still felt it in his chest and it set his teeth on edge. He pushed through it, finding the lines of code that would let him quickly swap out its IFF data with his own, and deleted them.

" _VI, paste to watch!"_ He commanded, and an instant later he saw his data replace that which he'd gotten rid of - the drone now able to identify Alliance personnel as friendly, and UN forces as enemies.

Jorell saved the changes and before he'd even pushed himself out of the drone, it had stopped moving, processing the change and adapting to it. When Jorell's rear end hit the ground and he slid out from underneath the drone, it was already turning away from the Alliance forces - and Jorell saw something he didn't like.

"Wait - _did you guys shoot at this thing while I was in it?"_ He half shouted, half laughed, as the drone and its several dozen allies walked or flew to the FOB's perimeter and began patrolling.

"I mean… Yeah?" He heard someone his HUD identified as a Marine respond, "it was shooting at us!"

"While I was in it!" Jorell shook his head, giving the Marine a rude gesture with his arms - the Quarian equivalent to a middle finger - as Anderson approached and presented his hand. "Did anyone get hurt?" He asked, accepting the hand and pulling himself up.

Anderson nodded, _"Marine took a hit for Jackson. Tore a hunk out of his suit. Decompressed before we could patch it."_ He let the rest go unsaid, _"next time, play it safe. We could've made it without their drones."_

The news stung, and Jorell nodded, pursing his lips as he tried not to think about the guy he'd gotten killed. "Let's get the cannon." He sighed.

Anderson agreed, patting Jorell on the shoulder as the two approached the cannon, and the others set up a perimeter around it, using the drones as the first line of defense, and themselves as the last one. "Just learn from it. It's war and people die, but we just have to make sure the right ones do at the right times."

" _Interesting you say that while we're getting ready to blast apart the people we would have died for and alongside a year ago."_ Jorell noted, as they reached the semi-truck sized miniature mass driver, and Jorell tapped his watch to its computer, syncing the two of them up.

Anderson didn't have anything to rebuke that, _"be amazed how often in our history the allies of yesterday became the enemies of today."_ He said, with a heavy sigh. _"That's one thing I've gotta give the Citadel: They may be stagnant, but damn if they haven't figured out a system that works, for the most part."_

Pulling up the targeting data and their own maps of the area, Jorell passed the controls of the cannon over to Anderson, who immediately started manipulating it, as the other N7 started approaching the cannon. _"Problem with them is they're too reactionary. Too scared of rocking the boat, just look at the Hegemony."_ A beat, _"the former Hegemony."_ Out of the corner of his eye, and the corner of his HUD, he saw the drones approaching and surrounding the cannon, and imagined what was happening with the other drones - how many people had already died by what they imagined to be friendly fire.

" _Oh I don't deny it."_ Anderson assured him, _"but you've gotta give 'em credit. Two thousand years."_ He said, with a small undertone of reverence, as he flicked the map and targeting system he was looking at to the arriving N7, and a larger one began to form in their synchronized HUDs. _"Hard to imagine."_ He said, letting the conversation drop as everyone arrived. _"First target. Any suggestions?"_ Anderson asked, as he instinctively took a look around him, trying to clear his surroundings even through the deadly thick sandstorm.

" _Take out the guns along Bravo's route."_ The Destroyer, who was sporting a host of fresh dings and scars in his thick armor, ran his fingers along the map, tracing a green dotted line along the route Bravo team would be running. _"Work our way out."_

Anderson nodded, tapping his fingers to the holographic map, each one letting out a small red pulse and leaving behind a target. As he did this, the gun next to them whirred to life and began turning, its barrel climbing higher into the air as it targeted. Anderson held his fire until he had all of the targets set.

" _Come on."_ He said, nodding at the Marines, who were hastily erecting fortifications around the cannon. _"Let's get cover before we do this."_

" _Agreed."_ Said the Shadow, who materialized right next to him. _"We've already got a lot of panicked soldiers coming."_

" _Oh."_ Anderson deadpanned, _"wonderful."_

The Marines and the N7 set themselves up a defensive line around their cannon, their drones providing their first line, and cover spheres, debris, and the sandstorm providing their second. Above all they needed to keep the cannon under their control - it was their force multiplier until or unless the _Eisenhower_ woke up. Jorell was given control over the drones and placed alongside Anderson next to the cannon, while the other N7 and the Marines took up positions and waited for the attack.

" _Firing."_ Anderson announced, as Jorell cycled through the drones' various vision modes - eventually finding thermal, and liking what he saw: It cut straight through the sandstorm, allowing him to see the bastions of high-celsius on the sub-zero planet, rushing towards them just as the cannon sang its song, it proving to be the loudest thing Jorell had heard today, even considering Mars' thinner atmosphere, the shots sounding like quiet whip-cracks instead of thunderous bangs. The shockwave of each shot created brief moments of clarity in the otherwise all-encompassing sandstorm, creating a small bubble of clean air that somehow managed to be even darker than it was when they were surrounded by sand.

Jorell made the announcement, _"got guys coming in from geo-west."_ He said, watching on his screen as the drones started firing. _"Bots are slowing them down."_ He manually prioritized the ones he saw with heavier weapons, this resulting in the drones launching volleys of micro-missiles that detonated right at the heads of their designated targets.

" _Sahn - send the fliers to our targets."_ Anderson commanded, _"We're blind. I want to see our effect on target."_

Jorell nodded and switched the controls to the air-drones, which were providing radar and motion scans of their perimeter, filtering the sand out of it, and relaying the data to the Alliance personnell's HUD's in the standard red wireframe, letting the collected Marines and N7 see the enemies even through the blindingly dense storm. Jorell knew this was too good an advantage to give up, even if it wouldn't last forever, so he only stole away a few of them and sent them off to the cannons the N7 had been blasting to pieces.

" _Standby…"_ He said, as he watched the false-color image of Mars' ground slide by underneath the drones. _"Got something. Sync your HUD."_ Jorell responded, as he started getting images of smoldering wrecks of bent and twisted metal: With every shot, the number of UN cannons went down, but it didn't take long for them to realize that, coupled with the drones going haywire and attacking them, this wasn't a computer glitch - this was a counter attack.

Through the aerial drones' imaging and patrols, Jorell saw a _lot_ of UN soldiers breaking off to rush their little improvised fortress. Just as they'd hoped, they split themselves into a battle on three fronts, but unfortunately, one of those fronts had only a few hundred people defending it against what would rapidly become _hundreds_ and _hundreds_ of enemies throwing themselves at the problem.

" _We've got incoming. They're splitting up, three ways."_ Jorell reported, shaking his head. _"Lotta guys heading our way. They'll slip past our drones…"_ He bit his lip, thinking. _"Lieutenant - orders. We've got a lot more drones than what are around us, but they're scattered. Will take time to make it our way."_

Anderson appeared to have already thought of this, and a red flag appeared on Jorell's HUD as the gun fired. _"Negative. I want you to send the drones already out to the MEZ. We've got a priority defense target - designation Talos. We've gotta keep that secure. Send the drones there, shore up the MEZ's defenses."_

Jorell wanted to argue, saying that would only make the UN break off their attack on the MEZ and focus more men on them and the Eisenhower, but he bit his tongue. Anderson was N7, the only people that knew more about fighting than them were the SIGMAs, wherever the hell _they_ were.

So, obeying orders and trusting they'd be able to handle it, Jorell zoomed his map out and selected everything not within one hundred meters of their cannon, sparing only five air-drones to keep an eye on the other mortar cannons and the Eisenhower. He sent them all en-masse to the MEZ, deciding to at least ask, _"how will they know not to shoot 'em?"_

" _You said you changed their IFF frequencies to Alliance, right? They'll show up Green."_ Anderson responded, absently, as he fired the cannon again - and Jorell saw a wave of red vanish from the recon-drones' sensors.

Jorell would have had something else to say, if bullets didn't start zooming over his head, signifying that the UN was sliding past their drones and were advancing on their gun. He cursed and hugged his barrier closely, while Anderson didn't even flinch from a bullet bouncing off of the leg of the cannon he was hiding behind, and the other Marines and N7 got to work returning fire.

Here, Jorell manually took control over one of the ground-drones, charging its railgun while he spun up its machinegun and ate away at the advancing soldiers' shields. When the railgun was fully charged, he found a cluster of heat so dense that it stopped looking like human bodies and instead looked like a gelatinous mass of orange, yellow, and white light. One railslug blasted the mass apart, opening up some of them to the environment, destroying the environment packs on others, and rapidly began cooling all of them in Mars' frigid atmosphere, resulting in some who in other situations would have survived, being as good as dead. Next he let out a volley of micro-missiles, killing less than he did shred shields and damage suits, opening up whole hosts of soldiers to be taken down by his allies.

As this happened, Jorell heard something over his radio, faint and static, but definitely not something on the clearer local channels. _"...howerto…."_ He heard, barely able to make out anything over the crackling hissing. _"...otcoming...efwindow…"_

" _El-tee?"_ Jorell asked, glancing over at Anderson, before he looked up and got a feel for how many soldiers were bearing down on them: A veritable _wall_ of red body outlines stood just past the several dozen mechs gunning them down, and practically constant streams of people were slipping between those mechs and gunning it for the Marine's position. They were doing what they could - and as the direction of the UN attack became more clear, more Alliance Marines shifted position to put more weight against it, but it was clear they couldn't hold out forever. Like clockwork, every few seconds Jorell saw the wireframe that represented his allies changing colors, some as green as their outlines, showing perfect health, some yellow for light injuries, some brown for moderate injuries, and some red for the men due to die any moment.

Jorell considered himself lucky he was where he was, but in the same breath he wondered how lucky he _truly_ was, all things considered.

" _I hear it."_ Anderson responded, and Jorell then heard, much more clearly, _"Eisenhower, readvise! Dead air, say again - dead air!"_

The Eisenhower tried again, but this time it was even worse than the last. _"...cerecon… Rail shot… rcommun…."_

Jorell threw a hail mary, _"sounds like they're trying something!"_

" _That it does, Sergeant. Anything you can do?"_

Jorell shook his head, _"not unless you can get this cannon to clear more…"_ He blinked, _"oh shit."_ He said, realization dawning on him.

Anderson realized it too, _"everyone down! Incoming!"_

And not a second after Anderson let out his warning, one of his drones caught the barest edge of what the Eisenhower's plan was, as its missile tubes opened up and a dozen rockets blasted out of the ship and immediately angled towards their cannon. The missiles flew through the air at supersonic speeds, each one detonating in sequence, each detonation closer and closer to their cannon, until a missile finally exploded practically over their heads, their detonations and the shockwaves they created creating a single expanding bubble of clean, dust-free air, that was already beginning to collapse back in on itself.

" _SSV Eisenhower to Marine Force Recon, authentication Alpha-Bravo Four Four Seven Nine, our window is brief, be advised: Wounded received, location noted. Hold the line, we're trying to pry open one of our launch bays, we're coming to you!"_ Said the voice of one of the _Eisenhower's_ communications officers, her voice so calm that one could be forgiven if they wondered if she even knew there was fighting going on.

" _Copy that, Eisenhower!"_ Anderson shot back.

" _Addendum: The Talos wing is repo...vyfighti…rtarsup…"_ They added, the radio traffic descending further and further into harsh static the more she talked.

" _Eisenhower, storm's picking back up! Copy Talos Wing, will recon!"_ He said, as the cannon fired again, and the drone Jorell had taken direct control over was taken down by a particularly gutsy soldier shoving a grenade in its missile pod. _"Glynn, new orders: Get to the Talos wing!"_

" _Copy."_ Said the Shadow, before Jorell saw her HUD outline _vanish._

" _Can I even ask what's in there?"_ Jorell asked, feeling more than hearing more and more bullets striking the armor plate at his back.

" _It's in the MEZ, Sahn. That's all you can know."_

Jorell didn't dispute that, but it didn't stop him from being frustrated that it was so important that its distress meant they lost their invisible back-stabbing ninja. Her disappearance instantly meant the UN was able to increase its pressure on the Marine defensive line. Then, as if feeling challenged, the universe proved it could absolutely make their lives worse, when Jorell was sent flying by a gigantic explosion for the second time that day.

He flew through the low-gravity air, feeling a bullet break his shields and lodge itself in his shoulder as he tumbled towards the ground. He hit the ground and rolled to a halt, the last thing he remembered being the side of his head smashing onto a rock, the world going dark, and his shoulder going from hot to cold way too fast to be any good.

When Jorell awoke, the dust storm was still raging, he felt like he'd been left in the snow for eight hours, his head hurt like the worst hangover he'd ever had, and there was a loud, shrill alarm that was only making his head pound even harder. Instinct driven into him by three of the hardest, longest months of his life drove his actions more than anything else, and the quarian, as though on auto-pilot, drunkenly pushed himself to a sitting position and began digging through his combat-vest for a patch kit. Slowly, lucidity began to return to him, and by the time his faculties returned, he'd managed to locate the breach in his suit, break open his patch-kit, and apply the sealant, resulting in the loud hiss and the ear-piercing alarms to quiet down until they were silent.

And as his suit now no longer had to combat a leak by brute-forcing it, he felt its heating unit kick in and begin flowing a warm, thick liquid through the capillaries that lined his suit. As this occurred, however, Jorell realized something:

He was deaf.

Or rather, the only thing he could hear was the sound of the storm around him. Of sand hitting the sides and back of his helmet. There was no radio traffic, no one speaking, no panicked 'what just hit us', or Anderson yelling at him to call the drones back, nothing.

Staggering to his feet, Jorell took a look around - and saw the last vestiges of the battle he'd been blasted away from. Maybe it was his concussion talking, but he found it strange that a lot of the gunfire was being directed towards the _sky,_ now.

Jorell blinked, and actually looked to said sky, his heart sinking as he realized why such a thing would be happening.

Sure enough, through the darkness of the sandstorm, he could see the bright spotlights of Alliance shuttles growing smaller and smaller, and zooming off towards the downed Carrier.

Without him.

" _Oh no…_ " He whispered, his breath fogging up his visor. _"Oh… No."_ He pulled up his smart watch, and -

Nothing.

The Quarian blinked, manually locating and hitting the power button, but finding it unresponsive. A thousand different issues and potential solutions flew through his head, but he discarded all of them for sake of expediency, and reached into one of his pockets and retrieved his spare watch - the watch his last deployment had necessitated keeping on him, and in one of the hidden pockets of his suit, for occasions almost mirroring the one he was in now: Down, out, and with nothing working the way it was supposed to.

Pulling out this watch, Jorell didn't even wrap it around his wrist - instead hitting the power button and allowing it to go through the process as he oriented himself and, after realizing he had absolutely no idea where he was in relation to the cannon, he too realized that his _HUD_ was down too, and with it his maps, meaning he was, for all intents and purposes, blind _and_ deaf.

Oh, and of course his rifle was missing, too. So blind, deaf, and with naught but a pistol, a knife, and a lot of tools, half of which would be useless to him if he'd been hit by an EMP.

But, as he scrambled off in the direction he hoped the UN's drone depot was, he realized he couldn't have been hit by an EMP. His suit was still working, he saw a lot of flashlights over in the UN side, and the Alliance shuttles were still working. Not much was hardened against EMP's due to the sheer cost of it, and even the things that were couldn't claim to be immune to it all - meaning that even a starship getting hit by an EMP could only really limp along until it got fixed. And he couldn't have been hacked, they would have just cut power to everything and let the air leak out of his suit.

 _So what?_ Jorell asked himself, as he found a building and felt his way around it, the dust in the air growing so thick that he could barely see past his elbow. _I hit my head… But the computers in my suit aren't centralized. At worst my HUD shouldn't be working, not… Everything._ He found a corner, worked his way around it, and kept going until he felt his hand run into an airlock. Of course its automated functions were down, so he had to manually crank the handle and open it up - venting the airlock, but fortunately not the building proper. So, sliding inside, Jorell shut and locked the airlock and, now out of the storm, manually pulled levers and equalized the airlock to the building.

Entering, he found the lights out, and none of the computers functioning. His helmet's flashlights failed to work, of course, but a flashlight he kept in his vest still worked fine, so clicking that on, he found that he had felt his way into a small barracks of sorts. Not ideal, but it at least kept him out of the storm, and with tech acting the way it was and the cannon likely destroyed by whatever had hit them, that meant the UN had probably already turned around and beat feet for the _Eisenhower_. Hopefully, Jorell was safe for the time being.

Finding a corner, Jorell, his head throbbing, knelt down and pulled up the watch he'd been letting boot up. He hit the power button again, and the nanites that made the dust-like holograms spread out, briefly flickering to life and showing the Quarian's spartan desktop.

Before the screen flickered once and promptly died.

 _Well… That's not right._ He panted, determining that it wasn't some kind of physical damage to the computers in his suit, and wondering if he hadn't been hacked after all, as he tried to reconcile what was happening here with why he hadn't either been found and killed, or just straight-up killed. Some of the functions of his suit that were still working were, after all, networked - it was a fact of life of the modern age. So if someone had broken into him, they should have been able to just turn off his life support, kill his oxygen, or any number of things. He considered, but eventually discarded, that an AI was the culprit - without a working DS/C, the UN would need one right here with them, and the N7 would have mentioned the possibility that they had one.

Jorell shook his head, this wasn't something he could fix on his own, and lacking his more advanced tools, it wasn't something he could even _try_ to fix on his own. As best he could understand, the autonomic functions in his suit - alarms, oxygen flow, temperature regulation - those worked, but anything higher than that was down. This meant that his non-networked tools should still work fine, his gun would obviously still work, and that he could step back out onto Mars and, all else equal, reasonably expect to survive.

However, a lot of the tools that would help him survive the people vying for his head weren't working. His HUD, his motion tracker, compass, clock, maps, his smart watches, radio, all of that was out. So, if he did the 'smart' thing and struck out for the Eisenhower, he'd effectively be running around a dust-choked area, ostensibly filled with enemies, that would shoot him if and when they found out who he was. To say nothing of the Eisenhower and the Alliance forces there, who obviously would shoot anyone trying to cross their defensive line.

Tapping his fingers on the ground as he leaned his head against the wall, Jorell tried to work out a solution. A _lot_ of his problems would be fixed if he could just -

He blinked.

Hell, it was better than nothing.

Pulling out a multi-tool from his vest, Jorell laid the spare smart-watch on the ground, and pinned his flashlight between his shoulder and his neck as he pried open its face. Jorell attached a magnifier to his mask and leaned in close, piece by piece pulling the watch apart as he dug further and further inside. He had to be careful not to break or sever something he couldn't afford to, or wasn't _intending_ to. His plan, his desperate hope, his shot in the dark, was that if he found and pried out the device's equivalent to a computer's network card. If he could remove that, he'd effectively neuter the watch, rendering it unable to connect to anything else, but also meaning nothing else could break into it, and potentially giving him control over it again. From there, he could attach a hardline to his suit and systematically force everything's connection to turn off, giving him his technological edge back, and as well affording him a much higher chance to make it to the Eisenhower.

Of course he was running the risk of screwing up and turning the whole thing into a military-grade paperweight, or that whatever was mucking around with everything hadn't just fried it, but something was better than nothing, and he felt better at least doing _something._

The whole process, taking the watch apart, finding what he was looking for, killing it, and then putting it all back together, took a quarter of an hour. During this time Jorell flinched at even the slightest sound coming from outside the prefab-unit, worrying that the UN had decided to sweep their FOB for survivors, or, worse, had decided to repopulate it, or had concluded that perhaps it hadn't been affected by the whatever-it-was and could help them fix it. Fortunately for Jorell, none of the noises reared up to kill him, and after fifteen minutes, he had the watch put back together. Caution thoroughly thrown to the wind, he hit the power button, feeling no small amount of elation when its screen actually turned on and began the boot-process.

And feeling outright _glee_ when the hologram returned, and the desktop actually _stayed_ this time, and remained active even after several minutes of poking around and testing it out. Letting out a relieved sigh, Jorell then went and, to expedite the process, simply killed his suit's network connection entirely, isolating it and avoiding having to individually disable _everything_.

With his suit active again, all of its features rapidly returned to him. His HUD booted up, his motion tracker started firing again, even his radio turned back on - though the lattermost obviously only had dead air.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that Jorell's HUD let him know something he'd been a little worried about: He was running low on air. He'd been out, unconscious, with a leak in his suit, for twenty minutes, and when added on to all the time he'd already spent outside today, he was down to less than ten minutes of air. Add on his emergency filters, and he could run around outside for another thirty. This meant that he could pretty much _only_ run for the Eisenhower, and wouldn't have much time to think about how he'd convince the Alliance not to shoot him. But if he _could_ make it, then from there he'd be able to find a medic who could fix the problem.

 _So…_ He sighed, _I'm pretty much going to have to book it._ Fine, he could do that - just one man in a sandstorm covering an entire planet and blotting out the sun, he could feasibly make it. The question now was how would he convince the crew of the _Eisenhower_ he wasn't a UN soldier? Getting the Drones to follow him would obviously be out - if they were even still active. He couldn't try to take a long way around with how limited his oxygen was, so how could he? All he had to do was get to them, once they could see him they'd be able to at least identify him as Alliance.

Jorell frowned, the solution couldn't be as simple as going straight at them, could it? No, it would be suicide. But for what it was worth, if the tech issues he was facing were being dealt with by everyone else, then he would be the only one with a motion tracker, or even a HUD. With how thick the storm was outside, no one would be able to _see_ him unless they were right on top of him.

 _Keelah…_ He thought, shaking his head. _It can't be that simple… It'll fucking kill me!_ But, realistically, what other option did he have?

So, the quarian shook his head, said "fuck it.", and flicked off the safety on his sidearm, before he plotted out his route on his map, marking his location and activating its navigation software. Without a link to the ship or the satellites, it wouldn't be fully accurate, but it would give him a rough idea of where he was at any given time. He slid that map down to one corner of his HUD, while in the other corner he kept his motion tracker.

Approaching the airlock, Jorell steeled himself. _I'm going to fucking die…_ He thought, cycling through the inner lock. _I'm going to fucking die._ He thought, venting the airlock. _I'm going to fucking die._ He thought, before opening the lock and exposing himself to Mars and its raging storm.

He immediately dropped down to a crouching stance and darted for the remains of the cannon. He overshot it entirely due to the storm's thickness, only realizing it when he found that he was more than a dozen meters past it on the map. He considered for a moment turning back, arguing with himself that scavenging a rifle off of one of the dead would be well worth it, but a look at his oxygen reserves told him to keep moving - if he missed it, he'd missed it and just had to go.

It was all Jorell could do to keep himself from shaking in his boots, he was so terrified. Even with his HUD active again, Jorell couldn't see very far in the storm, his environment almost jet black, with only the barest flicks of red due to Sol trying its hardest to peek through the storm. His motion tracker was severely reduced, only able to see a few meters around him before it became unable to differentiate the storm's movement and a person's, leaving his motion tracker one small blue dot inside of a great red circle. Jorell constantly fought with the instinct to slow down and cautiously clear his surroundings every few seconds, and the ever-building realization that speed and time were of the essence here: If he took too much time, he would _die._

Worse was when the clearly improvised nature of his navigation reared its head, and reality conflicted with what his HUD's maps were telling him, such as when his computer insisted there should be a building to his left, and yet all he could see and feel was nothing but dust and wind - not even a crater. As he krept and crawled through the storm, these moments piled up and made his heart race as his mind tried to quell the idea that he'd overshot this target like the had the cannon, and he was wandering out into the Martian wilderness, doomed to suffocate and die.

He wondered what it meant for his sanity when he felt _relieved_ that he could hear the faintest whispers of gunshots in the distance. Considering how thin Mars' atmosphere was, he rationalized that that meant he was close, but that also meant _he was close._ Nearest to him were enemy soldiers who wanted only to kill him, and further away were Alliance personnel, who would shoot him without a second thought if only as a precaution.

Here, Jorell finally slowed down - with fifteen minutes left in his reserves. He halted entirely when he saw red dots on his motion tracker, not moving towards him, but definitely away from the amassed UN personnel. He gulped through a bone-dry throat, realizing that with the reduced range of his motion tracker, that meant they were practically right on top of him! He kept still, going prone in the dust and clutching his pistol tightly, eyes flicking between his motion tracker and the dust and sand in front of him, as though he could will his eyes to pierce the sand and find the wandering UN soldiers.

After a few more precious minutes, they passed him by, seemingly none the wiser, and he let out a hollow breath, before shaking his head. He was a heartbeat away from getting to his feet, when he realized where he was right now - slow close to the ground - may actually be the best place for him. Everyone else was either looking in front of them at where the bullets were coming from, or above them, looking for jets - no one would look below them unless they knew a bomb was about to go off.

So, deciding he'd already made his peace with this suicidal plan, Jorell doubled down and _crawled,_ praying to the ancestors and even sparing the human Gods a few, that he'd at least get through this _alive._

The closer he crawled, the louder the gunshots became, until they went from distant whispers to up-close roars. Still nothing even approaching a gunfight in a full atmosphere, but even Mars' thinner air wouldn't stop the weapons from singing their song and being heard while they did it. Jorell moved carefully, trying his best to become two dimensional as he began to see muzzle flashes through the sand, and even the silhouettes of the people doing the shooting. Unbidden, his heart and his breathing both sped up, and it was all he could do to keep moving at this slow pace, aiming for the tiniest gap he saw in his motion sensor.

Closer he grew, until he felt as though he could _feel_ the UN soldiers over him, and he counted his every breath. Every inch felt like a battle fought and won, even as a battle was being fought right above him - bullets whizzed through the thin Martian air, grenades arced through the air and landed behind the UN line, the Alliance buying time, trying not to win, but to just outlast the UN. Jorell crawled forward, inching further and further past the UN line - nearly buying the farm when a soldier shifting position came down hard on the Quarian's leg, but by some miracle the man didn't put it together that Jorell wasn't a dead body, but rather a living person, and an _enemy_ at that. Regardless of the how or why, Jorell didn't stick around to find out, and scrambled forward until he was halfway between the UN line and the Alliance's.

Of course, then the problems came, and came fast: His shields took the hit from the grenade and shattered, and while that didn't do much on its own, it _did_ bring Jorell's eyes to his oxygen meter, revealing to him that his earlier panic had done him no favors. In fact, they had done him the exact opposite: He was lower on Oxygen than he should be.

He had _seconds_ before he'd be limited to what was in his mask, and seconds after that before he'd run out of everything and begin asphyxiating.

This threw Jorell into gear, and he started scrambling forward, trying to stay as low as he could whilst simultaneously throwing himself forward as fast as possible. His reserves hit zero before he saw another sea of yellow, unidentified dots on his motion tracker, and his mask started fogging up as he reached their line. He scrambled forward another meter so he wouldn't just pop up in front of a bunch of antsy, paranoid shooters, before he just popped up _behind_ a bunch of antsy, paranoid shooters.

His breathing already becoming labored and his vision fuzzy, Jorell hauled himself to his feet - covered in red Martian dust - and practically fell on top of the first guy he could see that didn't appear to be actively shooting blind into the dust and sand in front of them. The Marine, perhaps rightfully so, panicked and cold-cocked Jorell, his punch, compounded with the head trauma and asphyxiation, sending Jorell sprawling across the ground, unconscious and dead to the world.

A brief, "oh... Shit." Going unheard by all but its speaker.

* * *

Admiral Stephen Hackett had been given the unfortunate 'honor' of being selected as the man behind the fleet that would take the fight to the Sol System. Not something he ever thought he'd see again, after he and so many others had fought and bled to re-secure it during the Second Contact War. Nor did he ever truly think he'd be rolling into Sol to fight _other humans,_ and from _Earth_ on top of that. It made a part of him sick, even if a certain part of him felt he may know why, beyond politics, he had been selected for the job: Among the five Admirals in the Alliance, he was perhaps the only one who wouldn't enjoy the job at all.

Of course no one _wanted_ to, but the fact was that relations between Earth and the Alliance had never been really good, and the other Admirals each had a hangup or two about them. Some would enjoy the chance to make an example out of this - even if it was _Earth._ Some liked the idea of finally ending the grip of divided nation-states on their homeworld, while others looked forward to refining naval tactics against warp-capable vessels. For one reason or another, the other Admirals had been chomping at the bit and were _eager_ for this, now that it had started.

But Hackett?

He loathed the whole thing.

This war, and the reason it started, was perhaps the supreme expression of failure in not just the Alliance, but in humanity. In the Alliance, that they had allowed it to grow to this point instead of doing literally anything else to appease and work with their cultural center. On Earth, that they had jumped straight to shooting their fellow man instead of using their unparalleled social, political, or even economic power to effect change. Even if they hated the Alliance, which Hackett didn't even argue with, after reading what they'd done to those kids, they still did it from a good place, and even if they didn't care about the many species it now contained, that still meant they loved their own species, and going to war against the Systems Alliance would only harm humanity in the short and long run. Hackett's fleet could be out patrolling the Terminus, pacifying the former Hegemony, or orbiting the border between them and the Citadel. They could be responding to pirate rumors, lending their processing power and AI to identifying former Hegemony slaves, or at the very least they could be scouting Relays to make sure the systems they connected to were safe for their science vessels to explore. _Anything_ but rolling through the Sol System, taking tremendous losses on both his and Earth's side, and _invading Earth!_

Hackett was the only one among them all who thought of the whole thing as revolting, and it was for that reason that he'd been picked for the job. He, more than anyone, would exercise restraint and enact tactics and create plans that would allow them to take the system with a few casualties, and as little infrastructural damage, as possible.

That his fleet was second only to the Home Fleet also helped.

What didn't help, however, was the fact that he'd sent a carrier to Mars _hours_ ago, on a fifteen minute mission, and it hadn't even so much as whispered back to them. This worried Hackett, who sat in his captain's chair, rubbing his thinning hand on his forehead, fingers digging underneath his cover and into his gray hair. It had been a risk to send the _Eisenhower_ to Mars in the first place, but the ship had volunteered, and Hackett had been meticulous in his planning of the maneuver. He made sure they had more than enough clearance with the MEZ's dome, but were also close enough to the surface that ships in orbit or ODS' in Earth's orbit wouldn't risk shooting it from afar for fear of missing. He'd had them practically already deploying their forces as they entered Warp, and had checked with the ship's Captain and its AI six times that they knew their timetable.

That they weren't back yet, that they hadn't even sent so much as a morse-code message back, boded ill for the Admiral, as it meant only one thing: The Earth was desperate enough to shoot at a target, with an ODS, _in atmosphere._ It was the only possible thing they could have done, nothing else could have destroyed or crippled the ship that fast, and even if it had gotten into a fight, a Carrier was tough, even without an escort fleet. It would hold its own long enough to warp back out - something they had _planned_ for, even. If the ship had gotten in a knife fight with another, or more, and they followed them back by taking the same Entry as them, Hackett's fleet had been ready, guns loaded and capacitors charged.

But to have _nothing?_ The only solution was that they'd been hit by one of Earth's ODS'. A gun with a yield of sixty gigatons, that nothing - _nothing -_ in the galaxy could take a hit from, a weapon that could destroy countries and hit targets in other solar systems, and they'd effectively shot Mars with it. If they'd done this, Hackett couldn't even hold out the vain hope that they'd at least _tried_ to spare the biodomes, as if they were that reckless, they probably didn't even give the people on Mars a second thought.

And if they'd shot the _Eisenhower,_ that meant they'd likely taken the MEZ by now. The Alliance's greatest secrets would be theirs. Even Hackett didn't know what was in there - superweapons? Information? Both? Neither? Could it be used immediately? Or would it take time? Should Hackett send in the whole fleet, warp _right_ into Earth's orbit and bring all of the ODS Satellites into a knife fight? Blockade and hold the planet hostage like the Batarians would? Risk his ships getting sniped by the Home Fleet, parked out past the heliopause? Should he send a Frigate in to try and scout out what happened to Mars, and risk the whole crew? Or should he go through with the plan he'd already set, and just send in a different strike force entirely to hit Luna and secure the gun?

Each option had its merits, but they all had their risks. With the Mars attack having failed so completely, he was facing the genuine prospect of having to slug it out in the Sol System, and take it back planet by planet, and turn a war he'd hoped to have done in a year into one that could take a decade, unless he got the assistance of another fleet, or _two_. The Alliance had done its job well, making Sol a fortress-system after the war.

 _Too well._ The Admiral thought, letting out a hollow breath, as he leaned up in his chair, piercing blue eyes locking onto the holographic map of the solar system in front of him.

He had to make one last gamble - he had to try for Luna. The facilities there were a well kept secret, even the UN didn't know about them. Getting access to them would salvage his original plan, so he _had_ to try one more time, he _had_ to assemble one more team. This time he'd have to go a bit less subtle, though - he'd have to add in a few OD3's squads and a couple more N7 to the mix. As good as the Recon was, the only better shock-troopers better than a squad of OD3's were a squad of SIGMAs, and they'd gone deathly silent ever since Hannah Shepard had blown the whistle.

But as Hackett pulled up the fleet's personnel rosters on his personal tablet, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eyes. One of his communications officers was getting a report from the section of the ship she lorded over, and with how she leaned forward, one hand pressed to her ear, entire back bent, Hackett thought it must be good.

He turned back to the map in front of him, swiping his hand from the right to the left and bringing up his fleet. They were in interstellar space, five minutes from Sol by Warp, well out of range of their guns. If they'd done to Mars what he thought, though, he wouldn't have put it past them.

But his fleet was fine, everyone was green. His flagship's AI would have started screaming instantly if something had gone down, so this must be something else.

"Lieutenant." He said, turning to the officer. "Report."

She held up a finger, nodding, before she started typing away at the computer in front of her. "The signal's weak, sir… But I'm getting something from Mars."

Hackett's heart jumped in his chest, but forty years of experience in the navy crushed that down. "Put it up." He said, turning to the fleet map, which vanished, soon replaced with a grainy holographic image of a man in N7 armor. Hackett recognized him, "Lieutenant Anderson." He said, still holding the slightest doubt that this could be some kind of trick, a ploy on Earth's part. "How's the weather on Mars?"

" _Good as it's ever been, Admiral."_ Came Anderson's tough, deep voice, through a light haze of static.

Hackett finally let relief wash over him, which he vocalized. "I can't tell you how glad I am to see you alive, Anderson." He said, "but why are you calling me from the Eisenhower? What happened?"

Anderson nodded at that, _"things went to hell in a handbasket pretty quick, sir."_ He said, _"the Eisenhower sortied probably half of what she was supposed to when Earth shot her with an ODS."_

Hackett pursed his lips, readying himself for terrible news. "How bad?" He grumbled.

" _Not as bad as it could be. Considering we and the Recon are still alive, I'm pretty sure they didn't hit us full-strength."_ The N7 began, _"and they shot the dome, not the ship. Dome went down and the UN got in. They made it to Talos, nailed it with a mortar. Whatever was in got out, 'cause after that everyone went dark."_

Hackett sighed, Talos was one of the few things he'd been cleared to know about, because of how important it was to ensure what had happened didn't happen. "You purged it?"

Anderson nodded, _"Glynn got the job done, but the local battle-net went down. We were literally firing blind until we finally reconnected with the Eisenhower's AI and it started piecing everything back together."_

Hackett felt glad about that, but still worried what this could mean in the future. If they missed even _one,_ they could be in for a bad time. "And the Eisenhower?"

" _She went down when the shockwave killed her shields and the dust caked up her engines, but it's structural damage. She'll be space-worthy when you roll in with the fleet."_ A beat, _"to add onto that - the dust. Big storm, we're blind down here… Worried it's all over the planet."_

Another thing to deal with, but on the whole scale of things, minor. Mars was Mars, its settlements had been built with global storms in mind. At least the dome had taken the brunt of the impact. "How are your casualties?" He asked, "can you still move onto Luna?"

Anderson nodded, _"we were brought down to near combat-ineffectiveness by the shot, worst injuries came from the fighting… But with the ship pretty much stuck here for the time being, we can use their resources. We should be back up by the end of the week."_ He said, _"we'll make it to Luna, sir."_

Hackett let out a long sigh, "good work, Anderson. Anything else?"

Anderson lifted his head, thinking a moment, before nodding. _"Yes, actually. Ran into an interesting Marine on the job today. Thought I'd lost him after an explosion separated us and Talos got breached, but he's tough, sir. Made his way through the sandstorm, through the fighting, back to the_ Eisenhower. _"_

Hackett frowned, "really?" He prodded, knowing Anderson had a point.

" _He's still out right now, so he doesn't know it, but he's the reason we're mopping up instead of still shooting blind. When we got him to the medical bay we found that his HUD and the computers in his suit were still working. Traced it back to some modifications he'd apparently done to his smart watch on the fly."_ He explained, _"kid cracked open the watch and took a multitool to its motherboard, managed to kill its network connection without destroying the thing. Used that to break back into his suit and undo what you-know-what did to everyone's tech. When we figured out how he did it, we were able to do the same thing. Killed the network to my suit, activated near-field, spread it like a computer patch. Twenty minutes later we had comms and HUD and such back. And before that, kid broke through and took control of the UN's drones… Helped us route 'em."_

Hackett nodded, the frown vanishing from his face as he realized where Anderson was going. "I see."

So Anderson decided to get to the point, _"kid's got the spark, sir… I'd like to keep an eye on 'im, if I may."_ He said, _"give him some time to age up a bit, he may have the makings for an_ _N7."_


End file.
